
COFlKIGHT DEPOSm 



QPO 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 



BY IRVIN S. COBB 



FICTION 

From Place to Place 

Those Times and These 

Local Color 

Old Judge Priest 

Back Home 

The Escape of Mr. Trimm 

WIT AND HUMOR 

The Abandoned Farmers 

The Life of the Party 

Eating in Two or Three Languages 

"On Well, You ICnow How Women Are !" 

Fibble D.D. 

"Speaking of Operations — " 

Europe Revised 

Roughing It De Luxe 

Cobb's Bill of Fare 

Cobb's Anatomy 

MISCELLANY 

The Thunders of Silence 
The Glory of the Coming 
Paths of Glory 
"Speaking of Prussians — " 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/abandonedfarmersOOcobb 




IN KAINV WEATHER WE HKOl (IHT U.MBKEM.AS ALONG. 



THE ABANDONED 
FARMERS 



BY 

IRVIN S. COBB 

HIS HUMOROUS ACCOUNT 
OF A RETREAT FROM 
THE CITY TO THE FARM 




NEW Xar YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



^0^ 






COPTRIGHT, 1920, 
BT QEORGE H. DORAN COMPANT 






,^& 



CoPTBiOHT. 1916, 1919, BT The Curtis Pcblishino Coupabt 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



OCT 20 1920 



©CU601072 



TO 

WILLIAM G. MASSARENE, ESQ. 

OUB ARCHITECTURAL FRIEND AND GUIDE 
ALSO TO 

MR. MICHAEL DELFINO 

AN ARTIST AND A GENTLEMAN 

AND TO 

DIVERS OTHERS, SOME NOTABLE AND SOME 

HUMBLE, TO WHOM, SEVERALLY AND JOINTLY 

THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

OWE A DEBT OF GRATITUDE FOR SERVICES 

RENDERED 



CONTENTS 



CHAFTE3S PAQB 

I WHICH IS REALLY A PREFACE IN DISGUISE . 11 

II THE START OF A DREAM 17 

III THREE YEARS ELAPSE 57 

rv HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 87 

V IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 105 

VI TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE . 127 

VII "AND SOLD TO " Ifll 

VIII THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 205 

IX US LANDED PROPRIETORS . . . . . . ^ . . 223 



[vu] 



CHAPTER I: WHICH IS REALLY A PREFACE 
IN DISGUISE 



THE ABANDONED 
FARMERS 

CHAPTER I 

WHICH REALLY IS A PREFACE IN DISGUISE 

It is the inclination of the average reader to skip 
prefaces. For this I do not in the least blame him. 
Skipping the preface is one of my favorite literary- 
pursuits. To catch me napping a preface must 
creep up quietly and take me, as it were, unawares. 

But in this case sundry prefatory remarks be- 
came necessary. It was essential that they should 
be inserted into this volume in order that certain 
things might be made plain. The questions were: 
How and where? After giving the matter consid- 
erable thought I decided to slip them in right here, 
included, as they are, with the body of the text and 
further disguised by masquerading themselves 
under a chapter heading, with a view in mind of 
hoodwinking you into pursuing the course of what 

[11] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

briefly I have to say touching on the circumstances 
attending the production of the main contents. 
Let me explain: 

Chapter II, coming immediately after this .one, 
was written first of all; written as an independent 
contribution to American letters. At the time of 
writing it I had no thought that out of it, subse- 
quently, would grow material for additional and 
supplementary offerings upon the same general 
theme and inter-related themes. It had a basis of 
verity, as all things in this life properly should 
have, but I shall not attempt to deny that largely 
it deals with what more or less is figurative and 
fanciful. The incident of the finding of the miss- 
ing will in the ruins of the old mill is a pure figment 
of the imagination; so, too, the passage relating to 
the search for the lost heir (Page 55) and the 
startling outcome of that search. 

Three years later, actual events in the meantime 
having sufficiently justified the taking of such 
steps, I prepared the matter which here is pre- 
sented in Chapters III, IV and V, inclusive. In- 
tervened then a break of approximately two years 
more, when the tale was completed substantially in 
its present form. In all of these latter installments 
[12] 



A PREFACE IN DISGUISE 

I adhered closely to facts, merely adding here and 
there sprinklings of fancy, like dashes of paprika 
on a stew, in order to give, as I fondly hoped, spice 
to my recital. 

One of the prime desires now, in consolidating 
the entire narrative within these covers, is to round 
out, from inception to finish, the record of our 
strange adventures in connection with our quest 
for an abandoned farm and on our becoming aban- 
doned farmers, trusting that others, following our 
examples, may perhaps profit in some small de- 
gree by our mistakes as here set forth and perhaps 
ultimately when their dreams have come true, too, 
share in that proud joy of possession which is ours. 
Another object, largely altruistic in its nature, is 
to afford opportunity for the reader, by compari- 
son of the chronological sub-divisions into which 
the story falls, to decide whether with the passage 
of time, my style of writing shows a tendency 
toward improvement or an increasing and enhanced 
faultiness. Those who feel inclined to write me 
upon the subject are notified that the author is 
most sensible in this regard, being ever ready it 
welcome criticism, provided only the criticism be 
favorable in tone. Finally there is herewith con- 

[13] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

fessed a third motive, namely, an ambition that a 
considerable number of persons may see their way 
clear to buy this book. 

Quite aside from my chief aim as a writer, which 
is from time to time to enrich our native literature, 
I admit to sharing with nearly all writers and with 
practically all publishers a possibly selfish but not 
altogether unnatural craving. When I have pre- 
pared the material for a volume I desire that the 
volume may sell, which means royalties, which 
means cash in hand. The man who labors for art's 
sake alone nearly always labors for art's sake alone ; 
at least usually he appears to get very little else out 
of his toil while he is alive. After his death pos- 
terity may enshrine him, but posterity, as some one 
has aptly said, butters no parsnips. I may state 
that I am almost passionately fond of my parsnips, 
well-buttered. My publisher is also one of our 
leading parsnip-lovers. These facts should be 
borne in mind by prospective purchasers of the 
book. 

I believe that is about all I would care to say in 
the introductory phase. With these few remarks, 
therefore, the attention of the reader respectfully 
is directed to Chapter II and points beyond. 
[14] 



CHAPTER II: THE START OF A DREAM 



CHAPTER II 

THE START OF A DREAM 

For years it was the dream of our life — I should 
say our lives, since my wife shared this vision with 
me — to own an abandoned farm. The idea first 
came to us through reading articles that appeared 
in the various magazines and newspapers telling of 
the sudden growth of what I may call the aban- 
doned-farm industry. 

It seemed that New England in general — and 
the state of Connecticut in particular — was thickly 
speckled with delightful old places which, through 
overcultivation or ill-treatment, had become for the 
time being sterile and non-productive; so that the 
original owners had moved away to the nearby 
manufacturing towns, leaving their ancestral home- 
steads empty and their ancestral acres idle. As a 
result there were great numbers of desirable places, 
any one of which might be had for a song. That 
was the term most commonly used by the writers 
of these articles — abandoned farms going for a 

[17] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

song. Now, singing is not my forte; still, I made 
up my mind that if such indeed was the case I 
would sing a little, accompanying myself on my 
bank balance, and win me an abandoned farm. 

The formula as laid down by the authorities was 
simple in the extreme: Taking almost any Con- 
necticut town for a starting point, you merely 
meandered along an elm-lined road until you came 
to a desirable location, which you purchased for the 
price of the aforesaid song. This formality being 
completed, you spent a trivial sum in restoring the 
fences, and so on, and modernizing the interior of 
the house; after which it was a comparatively easy 
task to restore the land to productiveness by proc- 
esses of intensive agriculture — details procurable 
from any standard book on the subject or through 
easy lessons by mail. And so presently, with 
scarcely any trouble or expense at all, you were 
the possessor of a delightful country estate upon 
which to spend your declining years. It made no 
difference whether you were one of those persons 
who had never to date declined anything of value; 
there was no telling when you might start in. 

I could shut my eyes and see the whole delect- 
able prospect: Upon a gentle eminence crowned 
[18] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

with ancient trees stood the rambling old manse, 
filled with marvelous antique furniture, grand- 
father's clocks dating back to the whaling days, 
spinning wheels, pottery that came over on the 
Mayflower, and all those sorts of things. Round 
about were the meadows, some under cultivation 
and some lying fallow, the latter being dotted at 
appropriate intervals with fallow deer. 

At one side of the house was the orchard, the old 
gnarly trees crooking their bent limbs as though 
inviting one to come and pluck the sun-kissed fruit 
from the burdened bough ; at the other side a purl- 
ing brook wandering its way into a greenwood 
copse, where through all the golden day sang the 
feathered warblers indigenous to the climate, in- 
cluding the soft-billed Greenwich thrush, the Pea- 
body bird the Pettingill bird, the red worsted pulse- 
warmer, and others of the commoner varieties too 
numerous to mention. 

At the back were the abandoned cotes and byres, 
with an abandoned rooster crowing lustily upon a 
henhouse, and an abandoned bull calf disporting 
himself in the clover of the pasture. At the front 
was a rolling vista undulating gently away to where 
above the tree-tops there rose the spires of a typical 

[19] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

New England village full of old line Republicans 
and characters suitable for putting into short 
stories. On beyond, past where a silver lake glinted 
in the sunshine, was a view either of the distant 
Sound or the distant mountains. Personally I in- 
tended that my establishment should be so placed 
as to command a view of the Sound from the east 
windows and of the mountains from the west win- 
dows. And all to be had for a song! Why, the 
mere thought of it was enough to make a man start 
taking vocal culture right away. 

Besides, I had been waiting impatiently for a 
long time for an opportunity to work out several 
agricultural projects of my own. For example, 
there was my notion in regard to the mulberry. 
The mulberry, as all know, is one of our most 
abundant small fruits; but many have objected to 
it on account of its woolly appearance and slightly 
caterpillary taste. My idea was to cross the mul- 
berry on the slippery elm— pronounced, where I 
came from, ellum — producing a fruit which I shall 
call the mulellum. This fruit would combine the 
health-giving qualities of the mulberry with the 
agreeable smoothness of the slippery elm; in fact, 
if my plans worked out I should have a berry that 
[20] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

would go down so slick the consumer could not 
taste it at all unless he should eat too many of them 
and suffer from indigestion afterward. 

Then there was my scheme for inducing the com- 
mon chinch bug to make chintz curtains. If the 
silk worms can make silk why should not the chinch 
bug do something useful instead of wasting his 
energies in idle pursuits ? This is what I wished to 
know. And why should this man Luther Burbank 
enjoy a practical monopoly of all these proposi- 
tions ? That was the way I looked at it ; and I fig- 
ured that an abandoned farm would make an ideal 
place for working out such experiments as might 
come to me from time to time. 

The trouble was that, though everybody wrote 
of the abandoned farms in a broad, general, allur- 
ing way, nobody gave the exact location of any of 
them. I subscribed for one of the monthly publica- 
tions devoted to country life along the Eastern sea- 
board and searched assiduously through its columns 
for mention of abandoned farms. The owners of 
most of the country places that were advertised for 
sale made mention of such things as fourteen mas- 
ter's bedrooms and nine master's baths — showing 
undoubtedly that the master would be expected to 

[21] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

sleep oftener than he bathed — sunken gardens and 
private hunting preserves, private golf links and 
private yacht landings. 

In nearly every instance, also, the advertisement 
was accompanied by a halftone picture of a struc- 
ture greatly resembling the new county court 
house they are going to have down at Paducah if 
the bond issue ever passes. This seemed a suitable 
place for holding circuit court in, or even fiscal 
court, but it was not exactly the kind of country 
home that we had pictured for ourselves. As my 
wife said, just the detail of washing all those win- 
dows would keep the girl busy fully half the time. 
Nor did I care to invest in any sunken gardens. 
I had sufficient experience in that direction when 
we lived in the suburbs and permanently invested 
about half of what I made in our eight-by-ten 
jBower bed in an effort to make it produce the kind 
of flowers that the florists' catalogues described. 
lYou could not tell us anything about that subject 
— we knew where a sunken garden derives its name. 
We paid good money to know. 

None of the places advertised in the monthly 
seemed sufficiently abandoned for our purposes, so 
for a little while we were in a quandary. Then I 
[22] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

had a bright thought. I said to myself that un- 
doubtedly abandoned farms were so cheap the own- 
ers did not expect to get any real money for them ; 
they would probably be willing to take something 
in exchange. So I began buying the evening 
papers and looking through them in the hope of 
running across some such item as this: 

To Exchange — Abandoned farm^ centrally located, with 
large farmhouse, containing all antique furniture, barns, 
outbuildings, family graveyard — planted — orchard, woodland, 
fields — unplanted — for a collection of postage stamps in al- 
bum, an amateur magician's outfit, a guitar with book of in- 
structions, a safety bicycle, or what have you? Address 
Abandoned, South Squantum Center, Connecticut. 

I found no such offers, however; and in view of 
what we had read this seemed stranger still. 
Finally I decided that the only safe method would 
be by first-hand investigation upon the spot. I 
would go by rail to some small but accessible ham- 
let in the lower part of New England. On arriv- 
ing there I personally would examine a number of 
the more attractive abandoned farms in the imme- 
diate vicinity and make a discriminating selection. 
Having reached this conclusion I went to bed and 
slept peacefully — or at least I went to bed and did 
so as soon as my wife and I had settled one point 
that came up unexpectedly at this juncture. It 

[23] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

related to the smokehouse. I was in favor of 
turning the smokehouse into a study or workroom 
for myself. She thought, though, that by knocking 
the walls out and altering the roof and building a 
pergola on to it, it would make an ideal summer 
house in which to serve tea and from which to view 
the peaceful landscape of afternoons. 

We argued this back and forth at some length, 
each conceding something to the other's views ; and 
finally we decided to knock out the walls and alter 
the roof and have a summer house with a pergola 
in connection. It was after we reached this com- 
promise that I slept so peacefully, for now the 
whole thing was as good as settled. I marveled at 
not having thought of it sooner. 

It was on a bright and peaceful morning that 
I alighted from the train at North Newburybunk- 
port. Considering that it was supposed to be a 
typical New England village, North Newbury- 
bunkport did not appear at first glance to answer 
to the customary specifications, such as I had 
gleaned from my reading of novels of New Eng- 
land life. I had expected that the platform would 
be populated by picturesque natives in quaint 
clothes, with straws in their mouths and all whit- 
[24] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

tling; and that the depot agent would wear long 
chin whiskers and say "I vum!" with much hearti- 
ness at frequent intervals. Right here I wish to 
state that so far as my observations go the native 
who speaks these words about every other line is no 
longer on the job. Either I Vum the Terrible has 
died or else he has gone to England to play the 
part of the typical American millionaire in Ameri- 
can plays written by Englishmen. 

Instead of the loafers, several chauffeurs were 
idling about the station and a string of automobiles 
was drawn up across the road. Just as I disem- 
barked there drove up a large red bus labeled: 
Sylvan Dale Summer Hotel, European and Ameri- 
can Plans. The station agent also proved in the 
nature of a disappointment. He did not even say 
**I swan" or "I cal'late!" or anything of that na- 
ture. He wore a pink in his buttonhole and his hair 
was scalloped up off his forehead in what is known 
as the lion tamer's roach. Approaching, I said to 
him: 

"In what direction should I go to find some of 
the abandoned farms of this vicinity? I would pre- 
fer to go where there is a good assortment to pick 
from." 

[25] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

He did not appear to understand, so I repeated 
the question, at the same time offering him a cigar. 

"Bo," he said, "you've sure got me winging now. 
You'd better ask Tony Magnito — he runs the 
garage three doors up the street from here on the 
other side. Tony does a lot of driving round the 
country for suckers that come up here, and he 
might help you." 

To reach the garage I had to cross the road, 
dodging several automobiles in transit, and then 
pass two old-fashioned New England houses front- 
ing close up to the sidewalk. One had the sign of a 
teahouse over the door, and in the window of the 
other, picture postcards, birch-bark souvenirs and 
standard varieties of candy were displayed for sale. 

Despite his foreign-sounding name, Mr. Mag- 
nito spoke fair English — that is, as fair English as 
any one speaks who employs the Manhattan accent 
in so doing. 

Even after he found out that I did not care to 
rent a touring car for sightseeing purposes at five 
dollars an hour he was quite affable and accom- 
modating; but my opening question appeared to 
puzzle him just as in the case of the depot agent, 

"Mister," he said frankly, "I'm sorry, but I don't 
[26] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

seem to make you. What's this thing you is look- 
ing for? Tell me over again slow." 

Really the ignorance of these villagers regarding 
one of their principal products — a product lying, so 
to speak, at their very doors and written about con- 
stantly in the public prints — was ludicrous. It 
would have been laughable if it had not been de- 
plorable. I saw that I could not indulge in general 
trade terms. I must be painfully explicit and 
simple. 

"What I am seeking" — I said it very slowly and 
very distinctly — *'is a farm that has been deserted, 
so to speak — one that has outlived its usefulness as 
a farm proper, and everything like that!" 

"Oh," he says, "now I get you! Why didn't you 
say that in the first place? The place you're look- 
ing for is the old Parham place, out here on the 
post road about a mile. August'U take good care 
of you — that's his specialty." 

"August?" I inquired. "August who?" 

"August Weinstopper — ^the guy who runs it," 
he explained. "You must have known August if 
you lived long in New York. He used to be the 
steward at that big hotel at Broadway and Forty- 
second ; that was before he came up here and opened 

[27] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

up the old Parharn place as an automobile road- 
house. He's cleaning up about a thousand a 
month. Some class to that mantrap! They've got 
an orchestra, and nothing but vintage goods on 
the wine card, and dancing at all hours. Any night 
you'll see forty or fifty big cars rolling un there, 
bringing swell dames and " 

I judge he saw by my expression that he was on 
a totally wrong tack, because he stopped short. 

*'Say, mister," he said, "I guess you'd better step 
into the post-office here — next door — and tell your 
troubles to Miss Plummer. She knows everjrthing 
that's going on round here — and she ought to, too, 
seeing as she gets first chance at all the circulars 
and postal cards that come in. Besides, I gotter 
be changing that gasoline sign — ^gas has went up 
two cents a gallon more." 

Miss Plummer was sorting mail when I ap- 
peared at her wicket. She was one of those elder- 
ly, spinsterish-looking, kittenish females who seem 
in an intense state of surprise all the time. Her 
eyebrows arched like croquet wickets and her 
mouth made O's before she uttered them. 

"Name, please?" she said twitteringly, 

I told her. 
[28] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

"Ah," she said in the thrilled tone of one who is 
watching a Fourth of July skyrocket explode in 
midair. The news seemed to please her. 

"And the initials, please?" 

"The initials are of no consequence. I do not 
expect any mail," I said. "I want merely to ask 
you a question." 

"Indeed!" she said coyly. She said it as though 
I had just given her a handsome remembrance, and 
she cocked her head on one side like a bird — like a 
hen-bird. 

"I hate to trouble you," I went on, "but I have 
experienced some difficulty in making your towns- 
people understand me. I am looking for a certain 
kind of farm — a farm of an abandoned character." 

At once I saw I had made a mistake. 

"You do not get my meaning," I said hastily. 
"I refer to a farm that has been deserted, closed 
up, shut down — in short, abandoned. I trust I 
make myself plain." 

She was still suffering from shock, however. 
She gave me a wounded-fawn glance and averted 
her burning face. 

"The Prewitt property might suit your pur- 
poses — whatever they may be," she said coldly over 

[29] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

her shoulder. **Mr. Jabez Pickerel, of Pickerel & 
Pike, real-estate dealers, on the first corner above, 
will doubtless give you the desired information. 
He has charge of the Prewitt property." 

At last, I said to myself as I turned away, I was 
on the right track. Mr. Pickerel rose as I entered 
his place of business. He was a short, square man, 
with a brisk manner and a roving eye. 

"I have been directed to you," I began. He 
seized my hand and began shaking it warmly. "I 
have been told," I continued, "that you have charge 
of the old Prewitt farm somewhere near here ; and 

as I am in the market for an aban " I got no 

farther than that. 

"In one minute," he shouted explosively — "in 
just one minute!" 

Still clutching me by the hand, he rushed me pell- 
mell out of the place. At the curbing stood a long, 
low, rakish racing-model roadster, looking some- 
thing like a high-powered projdfctile and something 
like an enlarged tailor's goose. Leaping into this 
machine at one bound, he dragged me up into the 
seat beside him and threw on the power. Instantly 
we were streaking away at a perfectly appalling 
rate of speed — fully forty- five to fifty- five miles an 
[30] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

hour I should say. You never saw anything so 
sudden in your life. It was exactly like a kidnap- 
ing. It was only by the exercise of great self- 
control that I restrained myself from screaming 
for help. I had the feeling that I was being ab- 
ducted — for what purpose I knew not. 

As we spun round a corner on two wheels, spray- 
ing up a long furrow of dust, the same as shown 
in pictures of the chariot race in Ben-Hur, a man 
with a watch in his hand and wearing a badge — a 
constable, I think — ran out of a house that had a 
magistrate's sign over it and threw up his hand 
authoritatively, as though to stop us; but my com- 
panion yelled something the purport of which I 
could not distinguish and the constable fell back. 
Glancing rearward over my shoulder I saw him 
halting another car bearing a New York license 
that did not appear to be going half so fast as we 
were. 

In another second we were out of town, tearing 
along a country highway. Evidently sensing the 
alarm expressed by my tense face and strained 
posture, this man Pickerel began saying something 
in what was evidently intended to be a reassuring 
tone; but such was the roaring of the car that I 

[31] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

could distinguish only broken fragments of his 
speech. I caught the words "unparalleled oppor- 
tunity," repeated several times — the term ap- 
peared to be a favorite of his — and "marvelous 
proposition." Possibly I was not listening very 
closely anyhow, my mind being otherwise engaged. 
For one thing I was surmising in a general sort of 
way upon the old theory of the result when the 
irresistible force encounters the immovable object. 
I was wondering how long it would be before we 
hit something solid and whether it would be possible 
afterward to tell us apart. His straw hat also made 
me wonder. I had mine clutched in both hands 
and even then it fluttered against my bosom like a 
captive bird, but his stayed put. I think yet he 
must have had threads cut in his head to match the 
convolutions of the straw and screwed his hat on, 
like a nut on an axle. 

I have a confused recollection of rushing with 
the speed of the tornado through rows of trees; of 
leaping from the crest of one small hill to the crest 
of the next small hill ; of passing a truck patch with 
such velocity that the lettuce and tomatoes and 
other things all seemed to merge together in a man- 
ner suggestive of a well-mixed vegetable salad. 
[32] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

Then we swung off the main road in between the 
huge brick columns of an ornate gateway that stood 
alone, with no fence in connection. We bumpily 
traversed a rutted stretch of cleared land ; and then 
with a jar and a jolt we came to a pause in what 
appeared to be a wide and barren expanse. 

As my heart began to throb with slightly less 
violence I looked about me for the abandoned farm- 
house. I had conceived that it would be white with 
green blinds and that it would stand among trees. 
It was not in sight; neither were the trees. 
The entire landscape presented an aspect that was 
indeed remarkable. Small numbered stakes, 
planted in double lines at regular intervals, so as 
to form aisles, stretched away from us in every 
direction. Also there were twin rows of slender 
sticks planted in the earth in a sort of geometric 
pattern. Some were the size of switches. Others 
were almost as large as umbrella handles and had 
sprouted slightly. A short distance away an Ital- 
ian was steering a dirtscraper attached to a languid 
mule along a sort of dim roadway. There were no 
other living creatures in sight. Right at my feet 
were two painted and lettered boards affixed at 
cross angles to a wooden upright. The legend on 

[33] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

one of these boards was: Grand Concourse. The 
inscription on the other read: Nineteenth Avenue 
West. Repressing a gasp, I opened my mouth to 
speak. 

"Ahem!" I said. *'There has been some mis- 
take " 

"There can be no mistake!" he shouted enthu- 
siastically. "The only mistake possible is not to 
take advantage of this magnificent opportunity 
while it is yet possible to do so. Just observe that 
view !" He waved his arm in the general direction 
of the horizon from northwest to southeast. 
"Breathe this air! As a personal favor to me just 
breathe a little of this air!" He inhaled deeply 
himself as though to show me how, and I followed 
suit, because after that ride I needed to catch up 
with my regular breathing. 

"Thank you!" I said gratefully when I had fin- 
ished breathing. "But how about " 

"Quite right!" he cried, beaming upon me admir- 
ingly. "Quite right! I don't blame you. You 
have a right to know all the details. As a business 
man you should ask that question. You were about 
to say: But how about the train service? Ah, 
there spoke the true business man, the careful in- 
[34] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

vestor! Twenty fast trains a day each way — 
twenty, sir! Remember! And as for accessibility 
— well, accessibility is simply no name for it I Only 
two or three minutes from the station. You saw 
how long it took us to get here to-day? Well, then, 
what more could you ask? Right here," he went 
on, pointing, *'is the country club — a magnificent 
thing!" 

I looked, but I didn't see anything except a hole 
in the ground about fifty feet from us. 

"Where?" I asked. "I don't see it." 

"Well," he said, "this is where it is going to be. 
You automatically become a member of the coun- 
try club ; in fact, you are as good as a member now ! 
And right up there at the corner of Lincoln Boule- 
vard and Washington Parkway, where that scraper 
is, is the public library — the site for it! You'll be 
crazy about the public library ! When we get back 
I'll let you run over the plans for the public library 
while I'm fixing up the papers. Oh, my friend, 
how glad I am you came while there was yet time !" 

I breasted the roaring torrent of his pouring 
language. 

"One minute," I begged of him — "One minute, 
if you please! I am obliged to you for the interest 

[35] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

you take in me, a mere stranger to you ; but there 
has been a misunderstanding. I wanted to see the 
Prewitt place." 

"This is the Prewitt place," he said. 

**Yes," I said; "but where is the house? And 

why all this — why all these " I indicated by a 

wave of my hand what I meant. 

"Naturally," he explained, "the house is no 
longer here. We tore it away — it was old ; whereas 
everything here will be new, modern and up-to- 
date. This is — or was — ^the Prewitt place, now 
better known as Homecrest Heights, the Develop- 
ment Ideal!" Having begun to capitalize his 
words, he continued to do so. "The Perfect Addi- 
tion! The Suburb Superb! Away From the City's 
Dust and Heat! Away From Its Glamor and 
Clamor! Into the Open! Into the Great Out-of- 
DoorsI Back to the Soil! Villa Plots on Easy 
Terms! You Furnish the Birds, We Furnish the 
Nest I The Place For a Business Man to Rear 
His Family! You Are Married? You Have a 
Wife? You Have Little Ones?" 

"Yes," I said, "one of each — one wife and one 
little one." 

"Ah!" he cried gladly. "One Little One— How 
[36] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

Sweet! You Love Your Little One — Ah, Yes! 
Yes! You Desire to Give Your Little One a 
Chance? You Would Give Her Congenial Sur- 
roundings — Refined Surroundings? You Would 
Inculcate in Her While Young the Love of Na- 
ture?" He put an entire sentence into capitals 
now: "Give Your Little One a Chance! That 
IS All I Ask of You!" 

He had me by both lapels. I thought he was 
going to kneel to me in pleading. I feared he might 
kiss me. I raised him to his feet. Then his man- 
ner changed — it became domineering, hectoring, 
almost threatening. 

I will pass briefly over the events of the succeed- 
ing hour, including our return to his lair or office. 
Accounts of battles where all the losses fall upon 
one side are rarely interesting to read about any- 
way, SuflSce it to say that at the last minute I was 
saved. It was a desperate struggle though. I had 
offered the utmost resistance at first, but he would 
surely have had his way with me — only that a train 
pulled in bound for the city just as he was showing 
me, as party of the first part, where I was to sign 
my name on the dotted line A. Even then, weak- 
ened and worn as I was, I should probably not 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

have succeeded in beating him off if he had not 
been hampered by having a fountain pen in one 
hand and the documents in the other. At the door 
he intercepted me ; but I tackled him low about the 
body and broke through and fled like a hunted roe- 
buck, catching the last car just as the relief train 
pulled out of the station. It was a close squeeze, 
but I made it. The thwarted Mr. Pickerel wrote 
me regularly for some months thereafter, making 
mention of My Little One in every letter; but after 
a while I took to sending the letters back to him 
unopened, and eventually he quit. 

I reached home along toward evening. I was 
tired, but I was not discouraged. I reported prog- 
ress on the part of the committee on a permanent 
site, but told my wife that in order to find exactly 
what we wanted it would be necessary for us to 
leave the main-traveled paths. It was now quite 
apparent to me that the abandoned farm-seeker who 
stuck too closel}^ to the railroad lines was bound to 
be thrown constantly in contact with those false 
and feverish metropolitan influences which, radiat- 
ing from the city, have spread over the country like 
the spokes of a wheel or an upas tree, or a jauga- 
naut, or something of that nature. The thing to 
[38] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

do was to get into an automobile and go away from 
the principal routes of travel, into districts where 
the abandoned farms would naturally be more nu- 
merous. 

This solved one phase of the situation — we now 
knew definitely where to go. The next problem was 
to decide upon some friend owning an automobile. 
We fixed upon the Winsells. They are charming 
people! We are devoted to the Winsells. They 
were very good friends of ours when they had their 
small four-passenger car; but since they sold the 
old one and bought a new forty-horse, seven-pas- 
senger car, they are so popular that it is hard to 
get hold of them for holidays and week-ends. 

Every Saturday — nearly — some one of their list 
of acquaintances is calling them up to tell of a 
lovely spot he has just heard about, with good 
roads all the way, both coming and going ; but after 
a couple of disappointments we caught them when 
they had an open date. Over the telephone Win- 
sell objected that he did not know anything about 
the roads up in Connecticut, but I was able to re- 
assure him promptly on that score. I told him he 
need not worry about that — ^that I would buy the 

[39] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

road map myself. So on a fair Saturday morning 
we started. 

The trip up through the extreme lower end of 
the state of New York was delightful, being marred 
by only one or two small mishaps. There was the 
trifling incident of a puncture, which delayed us 
slightly ; but fortunately the accident occurred at a 
point where there was a wonderful view of the 
Croton Lakes, and while Winsell was taking off 
the old tire and adjusting a new one we sat very 
comfortably in the car, enjoying Nature's pano- 
rama. 

It was a little later on when we hit a dog. It 
seemed to me that this dog merely sailed, yowling, 
up into the air in a sort of long curve, but Winsell 
insisted that the dog described a parabola. I am 
very glad that in accidents of this character it is 
always the victims that describe the parabola. I 
know I should be at a complete loss to describe one 
mysolf . Unless it is something like the boomerang 
of the Australian aborigines I do not even know 
what a parabola is. Nor did I dream until then 
that Winsell understood the dog language. How- 
ever, those are but technical details. 

After we crossed the state line we got lost sev- 
[40] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

eral times ; this was because the country seemed to 
have a number of roads the road map omitted, and 
the road map had many roads the country had left 
out. Eventually, though, we came to a district of 
gently rolling hills, dotted at intervals with those 
neat white-painted villages in which New England 
excels; and between the villages at frequent inter- 
vals were farmhouses. Abandoned ones, however, 
were rarer than we had been led to expect. Not 
only were these farms visibly populated by persons 
who appeared to be permanently attached to their 
respective localities, but at many of them things 
were offered for sale — such as home-made pastry, 
souvenirs, fresh poultry, antique furniture, brass 
door-knockers, milk and eggs, hand-painted crock- 
ery, table board, garden truck, molasses taffy, laun- 
dry soap and livestock. 

At length, though, when our necks were quite 
sore from craning this way and that on the watch 
for an abandoned farm that would suit us, we came 
to a very attractive-looking place facing a lawn and 
flanked by an orchard. There was a sign fastened 
to an elm tree alongside the fence. The sign read : 
For Information Concerning This Property In- 
quire Within. 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

To Winsell I said: 

*'Stop here — this is without doubt the place we 
have been looking for!" 

Filled — my wife and I — ^with little thrills of an- 
ticipation, we all got out. I opened the gate and 
entered the yard, followed by Winsell, my wife 
and his wife. I was about halfway up the walk 
when a large dog sprang into view, at the same 
time showing his teeth in rather an intimidating 
way. To prevent an encounter with an animal that 
might be hostile, I stepped nimbly behind the near- 
est tree. As I came round on the other side of the 
tree there, to my surprise, was this dog face to face 
with me. Still desiring to avoid a collision with 
him, I stepped back the other way. Again I met 
the dog, which was now growling. The situation 
was rapidly becoming embarrassing when a gentle- 
man came out upon the porch and called sharply 
to the dog. The dog, with apparent reluctance, 
retired under the house and the gentleman invited 
us inside and asked us to be seated. Glancing about 
his living room I noted that the furniture appeared 
to be a trifle modern for our purposes; but, as I 
whispered to my wife, you cannot expect to have 
everything to suit you at first. With the sweet 
[42] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

you must ever take the bitter — that I believe is 
true, though not an original saying. 

In opening the conversation with the strange 
gentleman I went in a businesslike way direct to 
the point. 

"You are the owner of these premises?" I asked. 
He bowed. "I take it," I then said, "that you are 
about to abandon this farm?" 

"I beg your pardon?" he said, as though con- 
fused. 

"I presume," I explained, "that this is practically 
an abandoned farm." 

"Not exactly," he said. "I'm here." 

"Yes, yes; quite so," I said, speaking perhaps a 
trifle impatiently. "But you are thinking of going 
away from it, aren't you?" 

"Yes," he admitted; "I am." 

"Now," I said, "we are getting round to the real 
situation. What are you asking for this place?" 

"Eighteen hundred," he stated. "There are 
ninety acres of land that go with the house and the 
house itself is in very good order." 

I considered for a moment. None of the aban- 
doned farms I had ever read about sold for so much 
as eighteen hundred dollars. Still, I reflected, 

[43] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

there might have been a recent bull movement; 
there had certainly been much publicity upon the 
subject. Before committing myself, I glanced at 
my wife. Her expression betokened acquiescence. 

"That figure," I said diplomatically, "was some- 
what in excess of what I was originally prepared 
to pay; still, the house seems roomy and, as you 
were sajdng, there are ninety acres. The furniture 
and equipment go with the place, I presume?" 

"Naturally," he answered. "That is the cus- 
tomary arrangement." 

"And would you be prepared to give possession 
immediately?" 

"Immediately," he responded. 

I began to feel enthusiasm. By the look on my 
wife's face I could tell that she was enthused, too. 

"If we come to terms," I said, "and everything 
proves satisfactory, I suppose you could arrange 
to have the deed made out at once?" 

"The deed?" he said blankly. "You mean the 
lease?" 

"The lease?" I said blankly. "You mean the 
deed?" 

"The deed?" he said blankly. "You mean the 
lease?" 
[44] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

"The lease, indeed/' said my wife. "You 
mean " 

I broke in here. Apparently we were all getting 
the habit. 

"Let us be perfectly frank in this matter," I said. 
"Let us dispense with these evasive and dilatory 
tactics. You want eighteen hundred dollars for 
this place, furnished?" 

"Exactly," he responded. "Eighteen hundred 
dollars for it from June to October." Then, noting 
the expressions of our faces, he continued hurried- 
ly: "A remarkably small figure considering what 
summer rentals are in this section. Besides, this 
house is new. It costs a lot to reproduce these old 
Colonial designs!" 

I saw at once that we were but wasting our time 
in this person's company. He had not the faintest 
conception of what we wanted. We came away. 
Besides, as I remarked to the others after we were 
back in the car and on our way again, this house- 
farm would never have suited us ; the view from it 
was nothing extra. I told Winsell to go deeper 
into the country until we really struck the aban- 
doned farm belt. 

So we went farther and farther. After a while 

[45] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

it was late afternoon and we seemed to be lost 
again. My wife and WinselFs wife were tired; so 
we dropped them at the next teahouse w^e passed. 
I believe it was the eighteenth teahouse for the day. 
Winsell and I then continued on the quest alone. 
Women know so little about business anyway that 
it is better, I think, whenever possible, to conduct 
important matters without their presence. It takes 
a masculine intellect to wrestle with these intricate 
problems; and for some reason or other this prob- 
lem was becoming more and more complicated and 
intricate all the time. 

On a long, deserted stretch of road, as the 
shadows were lengthening, we overtook a native 
of a rural aspect plodding along alone. Just as we 
passed him I was taken with an idea and I told 
Winsell to stop. I was tired of trafficking with 
stupid villagers and avaricious land-grabbers. I 
would deal with the peasantry direct. I would 
sound the yeoman heart — which is honest and true 
and ever beats in accord with the best dictates of 
human nature. 

"My friend," I said to him, "I am seeking an 
abandoned farm. Do you know of many such in 
this vicinity?" 
[46] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

"How?" he asked. 

I never got so tired of repeating a question in 
my life ; nevertheless, for this yokel's limited under- 
standing, I repeated it again. 

*'Well," he said at length, **whut with all these 
city fellers moving in here to do gentleman-farm- 
ing — ^whatsoever that may mean — farm property 
has gone up until now it's wuth considerable more'n 
town property, as a rule. I could scursely say I 
know of any of the kind of farms you mention as 
laying round loose — no, wait a minute ; I do recol- 
lect a place. It's that shack up back of the country 
poor farm that the supervisors used for a pest 
house the time the smallpox broke out. That there 
place is consider'bly abandoned. You might try 
her." 

In a stern tone of voice I bade Winsell to drive 
on and turn in at the next farmhouse he came to. 
The time for trifling had passed. My mind was 
fixed. My jaw was also set. I know, because I set 
it myself. And I have no doubt there was a deter- 
mined glint in my eye ; in fact, I could feel the glint 
reflected upon my cheek. 

At the next farm Winsell turned in. We passed 
through a stone gatewa^^ and rolled up a well-kept 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

road toward a house we could see in glimpses 
through the intervening trees. We skirted several 
rather neat flower beds, curved round a greenhouse 
and came out on a stretch of lawn. I at once de- 
cided that this place would do undoubtedly. There 
might be alterations to make, but in the main the 
establishment would be satisfactory even though 
the house, on closer inspection, proved to be larger 
than it had seemed when seen from a distance. 

On a signal from me Winsell halted at the front 
porch. Without a word I stepped out. He fol- 
lowed. I mounted the steps, treading with great 
firmness and decision, and rang the doorbell hard. 
A middle-aged person dressed in black, with a high 
collar, opened the door, 

"Are you the proprietor of this place?" I de- 
manded without any preamble. My patience was 
exhausted; I may have spoken sharply. 

"Oh, no, sir," he said, and I could tell by his 
accent he was English; "the marster is out, sir." 

"I wish to see him," I said, "on particular busi- 
ness — at oncel At once, you understand — it is 
important !" 

"Perhaps you'd better come in, sir," he said hum- 
bly. It was evident my manner, which was, I may 
[48] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

say, almost haughty, had impressed him deeply. 
"If you will wait, sir, I'll have the marster called* 
sir. He's not far away, sir." 

"Very good," I replied. *T)o so!" 

He showed us into a large library and fussed 
about, offering drinks and cigars and what-not. 
Winsell seemed somewhat perturbed by these at- 
tentions, but I bade him remain perfectly calm and 
collected, adding that I would do all the talking. 

We took cigars — very good cigars they were. 
As they were not banded I assumed they were 
home grown. I had always heard that Connecticut 
tobacco was strong, but these specimens were very 
mild and pleasant. I had about decided I should 
put in tobacco for private consumption and grow 
my own cigars and cigarettes when the door opened, 
and a stout elderly man with side whiskers entered 
the room. He was in golfing costume and was 
breathing hard. 

"As soon as I got your message I hurried over 
as fast as I could," he said. 

"You need not apologize," I replied; "we have 
not been kept waiting very long." 

"I presume you come in regard to the traction 
matter?" he ventured. 

[49] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

*'No," I said, "not exactly. You own this place, 
I believe?" 

*'I do," he said, staring at me. 

"So far, so good," I said. "Now, then, kindly 
tell me when you expect to abandon it." 

He backed away from me a few feet, gaping. 
He opened his mouth and for a few moments 
absent-mindedly left it in that condition. 

"When do I expect to do what?" he inquired. 

"When," I said, "do you expect to abandon it?" 

He shook his head as though he had some marbles 
inside of it and liked the rattling sound. 

"I don't understand yet," he said, puzzled. 

"I will explain," I said very patiently. "I wish 
to acquire by purchase or otherwise one of the aban- 
doned farms of this state. Not having been able 
to find one that was already abandoned, though I 
believe them to be very numerous, I am looking for 
one that is about to be abandoned. I wish, you 
understand, to have the first call on it. Winsell" — 
I said in an aside — "quit pulling at my coat-tail! 
Therefore," I resumed, readdressing the man with 
the side whiskers, "I ask you a plain question, to 
wit: When do you expect to abandon this one? 
I expect a plain answer." 
[50] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

He edged a few feet nearer an electric push but- 
ton which was set in the wall. He seemed flustered 
and distraught; in fact, almost apprehensive. 

*'May I inquire," he said nervously, "how you 
got in here?" 

*'Your servant admitted us," I said, with dignity. 

"Yes," he said in a soothing tone; "but did you 
come afoot — or how?" 

"I drove here in a car," I told him, though I 
couldn't see what difference that made. 

"Merciful Heavens!" he muttered. "They do 
not trust you — I mean you do not drive the car 
yourself, do you?" 

Here Winsell cut in. 

"I drove the car," he said. "I — I did not want 
to come, but he" — pointing to me — "he insisted." 
Winsell is by nature a groveling soul. His tone 
was almost cringing. 

"I see," said the gentleman, wagging his head, 
"I see. Sad case — very sad case! Young, too!" 
Then he faced me. "You will excuse me now," he 
said. "I wish to speak to my butler. I have just 
thought of several things I wish to say to him. 
Now in regard to abandoning this place: I do not 
expect to abandon this place just yet — probably 

[51] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

not for some weeks or possibly months. In case I 
should decide to abandon it sooner, if you will leave 
your address with me I will communicate with you 
by letter at the institution where you may chance 
to be stopping at the time. I trust this will be 
satisfactory." 

He turned again to Winsell. 

"Does your — ahem — friend care for flowers?'* he 
asked. 

"Yes," said Winsell. "I think so." 

"Perhaps you might show him my flower gar- 
dens as you go away," said the side- whiskered man. 
"I have heard somewhere that flowers have a very 
soothing effect sometimes in such cases — or it may 
have been music. I have spent thirty thousand 
dollars beautifying these grounds and I am really 
very proud of them. Show him the flowers by all 
means — you might even let him pick a few if it 
will humor him." 

I started to speak, but Tie was gone. In the dis- 
tance somewhere I heard a door slam. 

Under the circumstances there was nothing for 
us to do except to come away. Originally I did not 
intend to make public mention of this incident, pre- 
ferring to dismiss the entire thing from my mind; 
[52] 



THE START OF A DREAM 

but, inasmuch as Winsell has seen fit to circulate a 
perverted and needlessly exaggerated version of it 
among our circle of friends, I feel that the exact 
circumstances should be properly set forth. 

It was a late hour when we rejoined our wives. 
This was due to Winsell's stupidity in forgetting 
the route we had traversed after parting from 
them; in fact, it was nearly midnight before he 
found his way back to the teahouse where we left 
them. The teahouse had been closed for some hours 
then and our wives were sitting in the dark on the 
teahouse porch waiting for us. Really, I could not 
blame them for scolding Winsell; but they dis- 
played an unwarranted peevishness toward me. 
My wife's display of temper was really the last 
straw. It was that, taken in connection with cer- 
tain other circumstances, which clinched my grow- 
ing resolution to let the whole project slide into 
oblivion. I woke her up and in so many words 
told her so on the way home. We arrived there 
shortly after daylight of the following morning. 

So, as I said at the outset, we gave up our pur- 
pose of buying an abandoned farm and moved into 
a flat on. the upper west side. 



[53] 



CHAPTER III: THREE YEARS ELAPSE 



CHAPTER III 

THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

I WOUND up the last preceding chapter of this 
chronicle with the statement that we had definitely 
given up all hope of owning an abandoned farm. 
After an interval of three years the time has now 
come to recant and to make explanation, touching 
on our change of heart and resolution. For at this 
writing I am an abandoned farmer of the most 
pronounced type and, with the assistance of my 
family, am doing my level best to convert or, as it 
were, evangelize one of the most thoroughly aban- 
doned farms in the entire United States. By the 
same token we are also members in good standing 
of the Westchester County — New York — ^Despair 
Association. 

The Westchester County Despair Association 
was founded by George Creel, who is one of our 
neighbors. In addition to being its founder he is 
its perpetual president. This association has a 
large and steadily growing membership. Any city- 

[57] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

bred person who moves up here among the rolling 
hills of our section with intent to get back to Na- 
ture, and who, in pursuance of that most laudable 
aim, encounters the various vicissitudes and the 
varied misfortunes which, it would seem, invariably 
do befall the amateur husbandman, is eligible to 
join the ranks. 

If he builds a fine silo and promptly it burns 
down on him, as so frequently happens — silos ap- 
pear to have a habit of deliberately going out of 
their way in order to catch afire — he joins automati- 
cally. If his new swimming pool won't hold water, 
or his new road won't hold anything else; if his 
hired help all quit on him in the busy season ; if the 
spring freshets flood his cellar; if his springs go 
dry in August ; if his horses succumb to one of those 
fatal diseases that are so popular among expensive 
horses ; if his prize Jersey cow chokes on a turnip ; 
if his blooded hens are so busy dying they have no 
time to give to laying — why, then, under any one 
or more of these heads he is welcomed into the fold. 
I may state in passing that, after an experimental 
test of less than six months of country life, we are 
eligible on several counts. However, I shall refer 
to those details later. 
[58] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

Up until last spring we had been living in the 
city for twelve years, with a slice of about four 
years out of the middle, during which we lived in 
one of the most suburban of suburbs. First we 
tried the city, then the suburb, then the city agam ; 
and the final upshot was, we decided that neither 
city nor suburb would do for us. In the suburb 
there was the daily commuting to be considered; 
besides, the suburb was neither city nor country, 
but a commingling of the drawbacks of the city and 
the country, with not many of the advantages of 
either. And the city was the city of New York. 

Ours, I am sure, had been the common experi- 
ence of the majority of those who move to New 
York from smaller communities — the experience of 
practically all except the group from which is re- 
cruited the confirmed and incurable New Yorker. 
After you move to New York it takes several 
months to rid you of homesickness for the place 
you have left; this period over, it takes several 
years usually to cure you of the lure of the city and 
restore to you the longing for the simpler and saner 
things. 

To be sure, there is the exception. When I add 
this qualification I have in mind the man who 

[59] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

wearies not of spending his evenings from eight- 
thirty until eleven at a tired-business-man's show; 
of eating tired-business-man's lunch in a lobsteria 
on the Great White Way from eleven-thirty P. m. 
until closing time ; of having his toes trodden upon 
by other tired business men at the afternoon- 
dancing parlor; of twice a day, or oftener, being 
packed in with countless fellow tired business men 
in the tired cars of the tired Subway — I have him 
in mind, also the woman who is his ordained mate. 

But, for the run of us, life in the city, within a 
flat, eventually gets upon our nerves ; and life with- 
in the city, outside the flat, gets upon our nerves to 
an even greater extent. The main trouble about 
New York is not that it contains six million people, 
but that practically all of them are constantly en- 
gaged in going somewhere in such a hurry. Nearly 
always the place where they are going lies in the 
opposite direction from the place where you are 
going. There is where the rub comes, and sooner 
or later it rubs the nap off your disposition. 

The everlasting shooting of the human rapids, 

the everlasting portages about the living whirlpools, 

the everlasting bucking of the human cross currents 

— these are the things that, in due time, turn the 

[60] 



THREE YEARS EEAPSE 

thoughts of the sojourner to mental pictures of 
peaceful fields and burdened orchards, and kind- 
faced cows standing knee-deep in purling brooks, 
and bosky delis and sylvan glades. At any rate, so 
our thoughts turned. 

Then, too, a great many of our friends were 
moving to the country to live, or had already moved 
to the country to live. We spent week-ends at 
their houses; we went on house parties as their 
guests. We heard them babble of the excitement 
of raising things on the land. We thought they 
meant garden truck. How were we to know they 
also meant mortgages? At the time it did not im- 
press us as a fact worthy of being regarded as sig- 
nificant that we should find a different set of serv- 
ants on the premises almost every time we went to 
visit one of these families. 

What fascinated us was the presence of fresh 
vegetables upon the table — not the car-sick, shop- 
worn, wilted vegetables of the city markets, but 
really fresh vegetables; the new-laid eggs — after 
eating the other kind so long we knew they were 
new-laid without being told ; the flower beds outside 
and the great bouquets of flowers inside the house ; 
the milk that had come from a cow and not from a 

[61] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

milkman; the home-made butter; the rich cream — 
and all. 

We heard their tales of rising at daybreak and 
going forth to pick from the vines the platter of 
breakfast berries, still beaded with the dew. They 
got up at daybreak, they said, especially on account 
of the berry picking and the beauties of the sunrise. 
Having formerly been city dwellers, they had some- 
times stayed up for a sunrise ; but never until now 
had they got up for one. The novelty appealed to 
them tremendously and they never tired of talking 
of it. 

In the country — so they told us — you never 
needed an alarm clock to rouse you at dawn. Sub- 
sequently, by personal experience, I found this to 
be true. You never need an alarm clock — if you 
keep chickens. You may not go to bed with the 
chickens, but you get up with them, unless you are 
a remarkably sound sleeper. When it comes to 
rousing the owner from slumber before the sun 
shows, the big red rooster and the little brown hen 
are more dependable than any alarm clock ever 
assembled. You might forget to wind the alarm 
clock. The big red rooster winds himself. You 
might forget to set the alarm clock. The little 
[62] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

brown hen does her own setting; and even in cases 
where she doesn't, she likes to wake up about four- 
forty-five and converse about her intentions in the 
matter in a shrill and penetrating tone of voice. 

It had been so long since I had lived in the coun- 
try I had forgotten about the early-rising habits of 
barnyard fowl. I am an expert on the subject now. 
Only this morning there was a rooster suffering 
from hay fever or a touch of catarrh, or something 
that made him quite hoarse ; and he strolled up from 
the chicken house to a point directly beneath my 
bedroom window, just as the first pink streaks of 
the new day were painting the eastern skies, and 
spent fully half an hour there clearing his throat. 

But I am getting ahead of my story. More and 
more we found the lure of the country was enmesh- 
ing our fancies. After each trip to the country we 
went back to town to find that, in our absence, the 
flat had somehow grown more stuffy and more 
crowded; that the streets had become more noisy 
and more congested. And the outcome of it with 
us was as the outcome has been with so many hun- 
dreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of 
others. We voted to go to the country to live. 

Having reached the decision, the next thing was 

[63] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

to decide on the site and the setting for the great 
adventure. We unanimously set our faces against 
New Jersey, mainly because, to get from New 
Jersey over to New York and back again, you 
must take either the ferry or the tube ; and if there 
was one thing on earth that we cared less for than 
the ferry it was the tube. To us it seemed that 
most of the desirable parts of Long Island were 
already preempted by persons of great wealth, liv- 
ing, so we gathered, in a state of discriminating 
aloofness and, as a general rule, avoiding social 
association with families in the humbler walks of 
life. Round New York the rich cannot be too care- 
ful — and seldom are. Most of them are suffering 
from nervous culture anyhow. 

Land in the lower counties of Connecticut, along 
the Sound, was too expensive for us to consider 
moving up there. But there remained what seemed 
to us then and what seems to us yet the most won- 
derful spot for country homes of persons in mod- 
erate circumstances anywhere within the New York 
zone, or anywhere else, for that matter — ^the hill 
country of the northern part of Westchester 
County, far enough back from the Hudson River 
to avoid the justly famous Hudson River glare in 
[64] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

the summer, and close enough to it to enable a 
dweller to enjoy the Hudson River breezes and the 
incomparable Hudson River scenery. 

Besides, a lot of our friends lived there. There 
was quite a colony of them scattered over a belt of 
territory that intervened between the magnificent 
estates of the multi-millionaires to the southward 
and the real farming country beyond the Croton 
Lakes, up the valley. By a process of elimination 
we had now settled upon the neighborhood where 
we meant to live. The task of finding a suitable 
location in this particular area would be an easy 
one, we thought. 

I do not know how the news of this intention 
spread. We told only a few persons of our pur- 
pose. But spread it did, and with miraculous swift- 
ness. Overnight almost, we began to hear from 
real-estate agents having other people's property 
to sell and from real-estate owners having their 
own property to sell. They reached us by mail, by 
telephone, by messenger, and in person. It was a 
perfect revelation to learn that so many perfectly 
situated, perfectly appointed country places, for 
one reason or another, were to be had for such re- 
markable figures. Indeed, when we heard the 

[65] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

actual amounts the figures were more than remark- 
able — they were absolutely startling. I am con- 
vinced that nothing is so easy to buy as a country 
place and nothing is so hard to sell. This observa- 
tion is based upon our own experiences on the buy- 
ing side and on the experiences of some of my 
acquaintances who want to sell — and who are taking 
it out in wanting. 

In addition to agents and owners, there came 
also road builders, well diggers, interior decorators, 
landscape gardeners, general contractors, an archi- 
tect or so, agents for nurseries, tree-mending ex- 
perts, professional foresters, persons desiring to be 
superintendent of our country place, persons wish- 
ful of taking care of our livestock for us — a whole 
shoal of them. It booted us nothing to explain 
that we had not yet bought a place; that we had 
not even looked at a place with the prospect of 
buying. Almost without exception these callers 
were willing to sit down with me and use up hours 
of my time telling me how well qualified they were 
to deliver the goods as soon as I had bought land, 
or even before I had bought it. 

From the ruck of them as they came avalanch- 
ing down upon us two or three faces and individ- 
[66] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

ualities stand out. There was, for example, the 
chimney expert. Tliat was what he called himself 
— a chimney expert. His specialty was construct- 
ing chimneys that were guaranteed against smok- 
ing, and curing chimneys, built by others, which 
had contracted the vice. The circumstance of our 
not having any chimneys of any variety at the mo- 
ment did not halt him when I had stated that fact 
to him. He had already removed his hat and over- 
coat and taken a seat in my study, and he continued 
to remain right there. He seemed comfortable ; in 
fact, I believe he said he was comfortable. 

From chimneys he branched out into a general 
conversation with me upon the topics of the day. 

In my time I have met persons who knew less 
about a wider range of subjects than he did, but 
they had superior advantages over him. Some had 
traveled about over the world, picking up misin- 
formation; some had been educated into a broad 
and comprehensive ignorance. But here was a self- 
taught ignoramus — one, you might say, who had 
made himself what he was. He may have known 
all about the habits and shortcomings of flues ; but, 
once you let him out of a chimney, he was adrift 

[67] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

on an uncharted sea of mispronounced names, mis- 
stated facts and faulty dates. 

We discussed the war — or, rather, he erroneously 
discussed it. We discussed politics and first one 
thing and then another, until finally the talk 
worked its way round to literature ; and then it was 
he told me I was one of his favorite authors. 
"Well," I said to myself, at that, "this person may 
be shy in some of his departments, but he's all right 
in others." And then, aloud, I told him that he 
interested me and asked him to go on. 

"Yes, sir," he continued; "I don't care what any- 
body says, you certainly did write one mighty 
funny book, anyhow. You've wrote some books 
that I didn't keer so mucli for ; but this here book, 
ef it's give me one laugh it's give me a thousand! 
I can come in dead tired out and pick it up and 
read a page — yes, read only two or three lines some- 
times — and just natchelly bust my sides. How you 
ever come to think up all them comical sayings I 
don't, for the life of me, see ! I wonder how these 
other fellers that calls themselves humorists have 
got the nerve to keep on tryin' to write when they 
read that book of yours." 

"What did you say the name of this particular 
[68] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

book was?" I asked, warming to the man in spite 
of myself. 

"It's called Fables in Slang," he said. 

I did not undeceive him. He had spoiled my day 
for me. Why should I spoil his? 

Then, there was the persistent nursery-man's 
agent, with the teeth. He was the most toothsome 
being I ever saw. The moment he came in, the 
thought occurred to me that in his youth somebody 
had put tooth powders into his coffee. He may 
not have had any more teeth than some people have, 
but he had a way of presenting his when he smiled 
or when he spoke, or even when his face was in 
repose, which gave him the effect of being practi- 
cally all teeth. Aside from his teeth, the most 
noticeable thing about him was his persistence. I 
began protesting that it would be but a waste of 
his time and mine to take up the subject of fruit 
and shade trees and shrubbery, because, even 
though I might care to invest in his lines, I had at 
present no soil in which to plant them. But he 
seemed to regard this as a mere technicality on my 
part, and before I was anywhere near done with 
what I meant to say to him he had one arm 
round me and was filling my lap and my arms and 

[69] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

my desk-top with catalogues, price lists, illustra- 
tions in color, order slips, and other literature deal- 
ing with the products of the house he represented. 

I did my feeble best to fight him off ; but it was 
of no use. He just naturally surrounded me. In- 
side of three minutes he had me as thoroughly 
mined, flanked and invested as though he'd been 
Grant and I'd been Richmond. I could tell he 
was prepared to stay right on until I capitulated. 

So, in order for me to be able to live my own 
life, it became necessary to give him an order. I 
made it as small an order as possible, because, as I 
have just said and as I told him repeatedly, I had 
no place in which to plant the things I bought of 
him, and could not tell when I should have a 
place in which to plant them. That petty detail 
did not concern him in the least. He promised to 
postpone delivery until I had taken title to some 
land somewhere; and then he smiled his all-ivory 
smile and released me from captivity, and took his 
departure. 

Two months later, when we had joined the 

landed classes, the consignment arrived — peach, 

pear, quince, cherry and apple. I was quite shocked 

at the appearance of the various items when we 

[70] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

undid the wrappings. The pictures from which 
I had made my selections showed splendid trees, 
thick with foliage and laden with the most delicious 
fruit imaginable. But here, seemingly, was merely 
a collection of golf clubs in a crude and unfinished 
state — ^that is to say, they were about the right 
length and the right thickness to make golf clubs, 
but were unfinished to the extent that they had 
small tentacles or roots adhering to them at their 
butt ends. 

However, our gardener — ^we had acquired a gar- 
dener by then — was of the opinion that they might 
develop into something. Having advanced this 
exceedingly sanguine and optimistic belief, he took 
out a pocket-knife and further maimed the poor 
little things by pruning off certain minute sprouts 
or nubs or sprigs that grew upon them; and then 
he stuck them in the earth. Nevertheless, they 
grew. At this hour they are still growing, and in 
time I think they may bear fruit. As a promise of 
future productivity they bore leaves during the 
summer — not many leaves, but still enough leaves 
to keep them from looking so much like walking 
sticks, and just enough leaves to nourish certain 
varieties of worms. 

[71] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

I sincerely trust the reader will not think I have 
been exaggerating in detailing my dealings with 
the artificers, agents and solicitors who descended 
upon us when the hue and cry — personally I have 
never seen a hue, nor, to the best of my knowledge, 
have I ever heard one ; but it is customary to speak 
of it in connection with a cry and I do so — when, 
as I say, the presumable hue and the indubitable 
cry were raised in regard to our ambition to own a 
country place. Believe me, I am but telling the 
plain, unvarnished truth. And now we come to 
the home-seeking enterprise: 

Sometimes alone, but more frequently in the 
company of friends, we toured Westchester, its 
main highways and its back roads, its nooks and its 
corners, until we felt that we knew its topography 
much better than many born and) reared in it. 
Reason totters on her throne when confronted with 
the task of trying to remember how many places 
we looked at — places done, places overdone, places 
underdone, and places undone. Wherever we went, 
though, one of two baffling situations invariably 
arose : If we liked a place the price for that place 
uniformly would be out of our financial reach. If 
[72] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

the price were within our reach the place failed to 
satisfy our desires. 

After weeks of questing about, we did almost 
close for one estate. It was an estate where a rich 
man, who made his money in town and spent it in 
the country, had invested a fortune in apple trees. 
The trees were there — several thousand of them; 
but they were all such young trees. It would be 
several years before they would begin to bear, and 
meantime the services of a small army of men 
would be required to care for the orchards and 
prune them, and spray them, and coddle them, and 
chase insects away from them. I calculated that 
if we bought this place it would cost me about 
seven thousand dollars a year for five years ahead 
in order to enjoy three weeks of pink-and-white 
beauty in the blossoming time each spring. 

Besides, it occurred to me that by the time the 
trees did begin to bear plentifully the fashionable 
folk in New York might quit eating apples; in 
which case everybody else would undoubtedly fol- 
low suit and quit eating them too. Ours is a fickle 
race, as witness the passing of the vogue for iron 
dogs on front lawns, and for cut-glass vinegar 

[73] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

cruets on the dinner table ; and a lot of other things, 
fashionable once but unfashionable now. 

Also, the house stood on a bluff directly over- 
looking the river, with the tracks of the New York 
Central in plain view and trains constantly ski- 
hooting by. At the time of our inspection of the 
premises, long restless strings of freight cars were 
backing in and out of sidings not more than a quar- 
ter of a mile away. We were prepared, after we 
had moved to the country, to rise with the skylarks, 
but we could not see the advantage to be derived 
from rising with the switch engines. Switch en- 
gines are notorious for keeping early hours; or 
possibly the engineers suffer from insomnia. 

At length we decided to buy an undeveloped 
tract and do our own developing. In pursuance of 
this altered plan we climbed craggy heights with 
fine views to be had from their crests, but with no 
water anywhere near; and we waded through 
marshy meadows, where there was any amount of 
water but no views. This was discouraging ; but we 
persevered, and eventually perseverance found its 
reward. Thanks to some kindly souls who guided 
us to it, we found what we thought we wanted. 

We found a sixty-acre tract on a fine road less 
[74] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

than a mile and a half from one of the best towns 
in the lower Hudson Vallev. It combined accessi- 
bility with privacy ; for after you quitted the cleared 
lands at the front of the property, and entered the 
woodland at the back, you were instantly in a 
stretch of timber which by rights belonged in the 
Adirondacks. About a third of the land was 
cleared — or, rather, had been cleared once upon a 
time. The rest was virgin forest running up to the 
comb of a little mountain, from the top of which 
you might see, spread out before you and below 
you, a panorama with a sweep of perhaps forty 
miles round three sides of the horizon. 

There were dells, glades, steep bluffs and rolling 
stretches of fallow land ; there were seven springs on 
the place; there was a cloven rift in the hill with a 
fine little valley at the bottom of it, and the first 
time I clambered up its slope from the bottom I 
flushed a big cock grouse that went booming away 
through the underbrush with a noise like a burst of 
baby thunder. That settled it for me. All my life I 
have been trying to kill a grouse on the wing, and 
here was a target right on the premises. Next day 
we signed the papers and paid over the binder 
money. We were landowners. Presently we had 

[75] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

a deed in the safe-deposit box and some notes in 
the bank to prove it. 

Over most of our friends we had one advantage. 
They had taken old-fashioned farms and made them 
over into modern country places. But once upon 
a time, sixty or seventy years back, the place of 
which we were now the proud proprietors had been 
the property of a man of means and good taste, a 
college professor; and, by the somewhat primitive 
standards of those days, it had been an estate of 
considerable pretensions. 

This gentleman had done things of which we were 
now the legatees. For example, he had spared the 
fine big trees, which grew about the dooryard of 
his house ; and when he had cleared the tillable acres 
he had left in them here and there little thickets 
and little rocky copses which stood up like islands 
from the green expanses of his meadows. The pio- 
neer American farmer's idea of a tree in a field or 
on a lawn was something that could be cut down 
right away. Also the original owner had planted 
orchards of apples and groves of cherries; and he 
had thrown up stout stone walls, which still stood 
in fair order. 

But — alas! — he had been dead for more than 
[76] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

forty years. And during most of those forty years 
his estate had been in possession of an absentee 
landlord, a woman, who allowed a squatter to live 
on the property, rent free, upon one unusual condi- 
tion — namely, that he repair nothing, change noth- 
ing, improve nothing, and, except for the patch 
v/here he grew his garden truck, till no land. As 
v/ell as might be judged by the present conditions, 
the squatter had lived up to the contract. If a 
windowpane was smashed he stuffed up the orifice 
with rags ; if a roof broke away he patched the hole 
with scraps of tarred paper ; if a tree fell its molder- 
ing trunk stayed where it lay; if brambles sprang 
up they flourished unvexed by bush hook or prun- 
ing blade. 

Buried in this wilderness was an old frame resi- 
dence, slanting tipsily on its rotted sills ; and the cel- 
lar under it was a noisome damp hole, half filled 
with stones that had dropped out of the tottering 
foundation walls. There was a farmer's cottage 
which from decaj^^ and neglect seemed ready to top- 
ple over ; likewise the remains of a cow barn, where 
no self-respecting cow would voluntarily spend a 
night; the moldy ruins of a coach house, an ice house 
and a chicken house; and flanking these, piles of 

[77] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

broken, crumbling boards to mark the sites of sun- 
dry cribs and sheds. 

The barn alone had resisted neglect and the 
gnawing tooth of time. This was because it had 
been built in the time when barns were built to 
stay. It had big, hand-hewn oak sticks for its 
beams and rafters and sills ; and though its roof was 
a lacework of rotted shingles and its sides were full 
of gaps to let the weather in, its frame was as solid 
and enduring as on the day when it w^as finished. 
This, in short and in fine, was what we in our ignor- 
ance had acquired. To us it was a splendid asset. 
Persons who knew more than we did might have 
called it a liability. 

All our friends, though, were most sanguine and 
most cheerful regarding the prospect. Jauntily 
and with few words they dismissed the difficulties 
of the prospect that faced us; and with the same 
jauntiness we, also, dismissed them. 

"Oh, you won't have so very much to do!" I hear 
them saying. "To be sure, there's a road to be 
built — not over a quarter of a mile of road, exclu- 
sive of the turnround at your garage — when you've 
built your garage — and the turn in front of your 
house — when you've built your house. It shouldn't 
[78] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

take you long to clear up the fields and get them 
under cultivation. All you'll have to do there is 
pick the loose stones off of them and plow the land 
up, and harrowi it and grade it in places, and spread 
a few hundred wagonloads of fertilizer; and then 
sow your grass seed. That old horsepond yonder 
will make you a perfectly lovely swimming pool, 
once you've cleaned it out and deepened^it at this 
end, and built retaining walls round it, and put in a 
concrete basin, and waterproofed the sides and bot- 
tom. You must have a swimming pool by all 
means ! 

"And then, by running a hundred-foot dam 
across that low place in the valley you can have a 
wonderful little lake. You surely must have a lake 
to go with the swimming pool ! Then, when you've 
dug your artesian well, you can couple up all your 
springs for an emergency supply. You know you 
can easily pipe the spring water into a tank and con- 
serve it there. Then j'^ou'll have all the water you 
possibly can need — except, of course, in very dry 
weather in mid-summer. 

"And, after that, when you've torn the old house 
down and put up your new house, and built your 
barn and your stable, and your farmer's cottage and 

[79] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

your ice house, and your greenhouses, and your 
corn-crib, and your tool-shed, and your tennis court, 
and laid out some terraces up on that hillside yon- 
der, and planned out your flower gardens and your 
vegetable garden, and your potato patch and your 
corn patch, and stuck up your chicken runs, and 
bought your work stock and your cows and chick- 
ens and things — oh, yes, and your kennels, if you 

are going in for dogs No? All right, then; 

never mind the kennels. Anyhow, when you've 
done those things and set out your shrubs and made 
your rose beds and planted your grapevines, you'll 
be all ready just to move right in and settle down 
and enjoy yourselves." 

I do not mean that all of these suggestions came 
at once. As here enumerated they represent the 
combined fruitage of several conversations on the 
subject. We listened attentively, making notes of 
the various notions for our comfort and satisfaction 
as they occurred to others. If any one had ad- 
vanced the idea that we should install a private race 
track, and lay out nine holes, say, of a private golf 
course, we should have agreed to those items too. 
These things do sound so easy when you are talking 
[80] 



THKEE YEARS ELAPSE 

them over and when the first splendid fever of land 
ownership is upon you! 

Had I but known then what I know now I These 
times, when, going along tlio road, I pass a manure 
heap I am filled with envy of the plutocrat who 
owns it, though, at the same time, deploring the vul- 
gar ostentation that leads him to spread his wealth 
before the view of the public. When I see a ma- 
sonry wall along the front of an estate I begin to 
make mental calculations, for I understand now 
what that masonry costs, and know that it is 
cheaper, in the long run, to have your walls erected 
by a lapidary than by a union stonemason. 

And as for a bluestone road — well, you, reader, 
may think bluestone is but a simple thing and an 
inexpensive one. Just wait until you have had 
handed to you the estimates on the cost of killing 
the nerve and cleaning out the cavities and insert- 
ing the fillings, and putting in the falsework and 
the bridgework, and the drains and the arches — and 
all! You might think dentists are well paid for 
such jobs; but a professional road contractor — I 
started to say road agent — makes any dentist look 
a perfect piker. 

And any time you feel you really must have a 

[81] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

swimming pool that is all your very own, take my 
advice and think twice. . Think oftener than twice ; 
and then compromise on a neat little outdoor sitz 
bath that is all your very own. 

But the inner knowledge of these things was to 
come to us later. For the time being, pending the 
letting of contracts, we were content to enjoy the 
two most pleasurable sensations mortals may know 
— possession and anticipation: the sense of the real- 
ity of present ownership and, coupled with this, 
dreams of future creation and future achievement. 
We were on the verge of making come true the 
treasured vision of months — we were about to be- 
come abandoned farmers. 

No being who is blessed with imagination can 
have any finer joy than this, I think — the joy of 
proprietorship of a strip of the green footstool. 
The soil you kick up when you walk over your acres 
is different soil from that which you kick up on 
your neighbor's land — different because it is yours. 
Another man's tree, another man's rock heap, is a 
simple tree or a mere rock heap, as the case may be; 
and nothing more. But your tree and your rock 
heap assume a peculiar value, a special interest, 
a unique and individual picturesqueness. 
[82] 



THREE YEARS ELAPSE 

And oh, the thrill that permeates your being 
when you see the first furrow of brown earth turned 
up in your field, or the first shovel-load of sod lifted 
from the spot where your home is to standi And 
oh, the first walk through the budding woods in 
the springtime ! And the first spray of trailing ar- 
butus! And the first spray of trailing poison ivy! 
And the first mortgage! And the first time you 
tread on one of those large slick brown worms, de- 
signed, inside and out, like a chocolate eclair ! 

After all, it's the only life ! But on the way to it 
there are pitfalls and obstacles and setbacks, and 
steadily mounting monthly pay rolls. 

As shall presently develop. 



[83] 



CHAPTER IV: HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 



CHAPTER IV 

HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

Soon after we moved to the country we became 
eligible to join the Westchester County Despair 
Association, on account of an artesian well — or, to 
be exact, on account of three artesian wells, com- 
plicated with several springs. 

I spoke some pages back of the Westchester 
County Despair Association, which was founded by 
George Creel and which has a large membership 
in our immediate section. As I stated then, any 
city-bred man who turns amateur farmer and moves 
into our neighborhood, and who in developing his 
country place has a streak of hard labor, is eligible 
to join this organization. And sooner or later — 
but as a general thing sooner — all the urbanites 
who settle up our way do join. Some day we shall 
be strong enough to club in and elect our own 
county officers on a ticket pledged to run a macad- 
am highway past the estate of each member. 

Our main claim to qualification was based upon 

[87] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

the water question; and yet at the outset it ap- 
peared to us that lack of water would be the very 
least of our troubles. When we took title to our 
abandoned farm, and for the first time explored 
the bramble-grown valley leading up from the pro- 
posed site of our house to the woodland, we several 
times had to wade, and once or twice thought we 
should have to swim. Why, we actually congratu- 
lated ourselves upon having acquired riparian 
rights without paying for them. 

This was in the springtime ; and the springs along 
the haunches of the hills upon either side of the 
little ravine were speaking in burbly murmuring 
voices, like overflowing mouths, as they spilled forth 
their accumulated store of the melted snows of the 
winter before; and the April rainstorms had made 
a pond of every low place in the county. 

In our ignorance we assumed that, since there was 
now plenty of water of Nature's furnishing, there 
always would be plenty of water forthcoming from 
the same prodigal source — more water than we 
could possibly ever need unless we opened up a 
fresh-water bathing beach in the lower meadow of 
our place. So we dug out and stoned up the upper- 
most spring, which seemed to have the most gen- 
[88] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

erous vein of them all, and put in pipes. The lay 
of the land and the laws of gravity did the rest, 
bringing the flow downgrade in a gurgling com- 
forting stream, which poured day and night with- 
out cessation. 

This detail having been attended to, we turned 
our attention to other things. Goodness knows 
there were plenty of things requiring attention. I 
figured at that period of our pioneering work that 
if we got into the Despair Association at all it 
would follow as the result of my being indicted for 
more or less justifiable manslaughter in having de- 
stroyed an elderly gentleman of the vicinity, whom 
upon the occasion of our first meeting I rechristened 
as Old Major Gloom, and of whom we still speak 
behind his back by that same name. 

The major lived a short distance from us, within 
easy walking distance, and he speedily proved that 
he was an easy walker. I shall not forget the first 
day he came to call. He ambled up a trail that 
the previous tenants, through a chronic delusion, 
had insisted upon calling a road; and he found me 
up to my gills in the midst of the preliminary job 
of trying to decide where we should make a start 
at clearing out the jungle, which once upon a time, 

[89] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

probably back in the Stone Age, as nearly as we 
might judge from its present condition, had been 
the house garden. 

We had been camping on the place only a few 
days. We climbed over, through and under mystic 
mazes of household belongings to get our meals, or 
to get to our beds, or to get anywhere, and alto- 
gether were existing in a state of disorder that 
might be likened to the condition the Germans cre- 
ated with such thoroughgoing and painstaking effi- 
ciency when falling back from an occupied French 
community. 

I trust we are not lacking in hospitality ; but, for 
the moment, we were in no mood to receive visitors. 
However, upon first judgment the old major's ap- 
pearance was such as to disarm hostility and re- 
arouse the slumbering instincts of cordiality. He 
was of a benevolent aspect, with fine white whis- 
kers and an engaging manner. If you can imagine 
one of the Minor Prophets, who had stepped right 
out of the Old Testament, stopping en route at a 
ready-made clothing store, you will have a very fair 
mental picture of the major as he looked when he 
approached me, with hand outstretched, and in 
warm tones bade me welcome to Upper Westches- 
[90] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

ter. He fooled me ; he would have fooled anybody 
unless possibly it were an expert criminologist, 
trained at discerning depravity when masked be- 
hind a pleasing exterior. 

When he spoke I placed him with regard to his 
antecedents, for I had been on the spot long enough 
to recognize the breed to which he belonged. There 
is a type of native-born citizen of this part of New 
York State who comes of an undiluted New Eng- 
land strain, being the descendant of pioneering 
Yankees who settled along the lower Hudson Val- 
ley after the Revolution and immediately started in 
to trade the original Dutch settlers out of their 
lands and their eyeteeth. 

The subsequent generations of this transplanted 
stock have preserved some of the customs and many 
of the idioms of their stern and rock-bound fore- 
bears; at the same time they have acquired most 
of the linguistic eccentricities of the New York 
cockney. Except that they dwell in proximity to 
it, they have nothing in common with the great city 
that is only thirty or forty miles away as the motor- 
ist flies. Generally they profess a contempt for 
New York and all its works. They may not visit 
it once a year; but, all the same, its influence has 

[91] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

crept up through the hills to tincture their mode of 
speech with queer distinctive modes of pronuncia- 
tion. 

The result is a composite dialectic system not to 
be found anywhere else except in this little strip of 
upland country and in certain isolated communi- 
ties over on Long Island, along the outer edge of 
the zone of metropolitan life and excitement. For 
instance, a member of this race of beings will call a 
raspberry a "rosbry" ; and he will call a bluebird a 
"blubbud," thereby displajdng the inherited ver- 
nacular of the Down East country. He will say 
"oily" when he means early, and "early" when he 
means oily, and occasionally he will even saj^ "yous" 
for you — peculiarities which in other environment 
serve unmistakably to mark the born-and-bred 
Manhattanite. 

The major at once betrayed himself as such a 
person. He introduced himself, adding that as a 
neighbor he had felt it incumbent to call. I re- 
moved a couple of the family portraits and a collec- 
tion of Indian relics and a few kitchen utensils, and 
one thing and another, from the seat of a chair, and 
begged him to sit down and make himself at home, 
which he did. He accepted a cigar, which I fished 
[92] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

out of a humidor temporarily tucked away beneath 
a roll of carpet; and we spoke of the weather, to 
which he gave a qualified and cautious indorsement. 
Then, without further delay, he hitched his chair 
over and laid a paternal hand upon my arm. 

"I hear youVe got Blank, the lawyer, searching 
out the title to your propputty here." 

*'Yes," I said; "Mr. Blank took the matter in 
hand for us. Fine man, isn't he?" 

*'Well, some people think so," he said with an 
emphasis of profound significance. 

"Doesn't everybody think so?" I inquired. 

"Listen," he said; "my motto is, Live and let 
live. And, anyhow, I'm the last man in the world 
to go round prejudicing a newcomer against an 
old resident. Now I've just met you and, on the 
other hand, I've known Blank all my life; in fact, 
we're sort of related by marriage — a relative of 
his married a relative of my wife's. So, of course, 
I've got nothing to say to you on that score except 
this — and I'm going to say it to you now in the 
strictest confidence — if I was doing business with 
Blank I'd be mighty, mighty careful, young man." 

**You astonish me," I said. "Mr. So-and-So" — 

[93] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

naming a prominent business man of the county 
seat — "recommended his firm to me." 

"Oh, So-and-So, eh? I wonder what the under- 
standing between those two is? Probably they've 
hatched up something." 

"Why, isn't So-and-So above suspicion?" I asked. 

"I wouldn't say he w^as and I wouldn't say he 
wasn't. But, just between you and me, I'd think 
twice about taking any advice he gave me. They 
tell me you've let the contract for some work to 
Dash & Space?" 

"Yes; I gave them one small job." 

"Too bad!" 

"What's too bad?" 

"You'll be finding out for yourself before you're 
done; so I won't say anything more on that subject 
neither. I could tell you a good deal about those 
fellows if I was a-mind to; but I never believed in 
repeating anything behind a man's back I wouldn't 
say to his face. Live and let live ! — ^that's my motto. 
Anyhow, if you've already signed up with Dash & 
Space it's too late for you to be backing out — but 
keep your eyes open, young man; keep your eyes 
wide open. Who's your architect going to be?" 
[94] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

I told him. He repeated the name in rather a 
disappointed fashion. 

"Never heard of him," he admitted; "but I take 
it he's like the run of his kind of people. I never 
yet saw the architect that I'd trust as far as I could 
sling him by the coat-tails. Say, ain't that Bink's 
delivery wagon standing over yonder in front of 
your stable?" 

"I think so. We've been buying some things 
from Bink." 

"You've opened up a regular account with him, 
then?" 

"Yes." 

"Well, I wouldn't reflect on Bink's honesty for 
any amount of money in the world. Of my own 
knowledge I don't know anything against him one 
way or the other. Of course, from time to time 
I've heard a lot of things that other people said 
about him; but that's only hearsay evidence, and I 
make it a rule not to repeat gossip about anybody. 
Still" — he lingered over the word — "still, if it was 
me instead of you, I'd go over his bills very care- 
fully—that's alll 

"I don't blame any fellow for trying to get along 
in his business; and I guess the competition is so 

[95] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

keen in the retail merchandising line that oncet in 
a while a man just naturally has to skin his custom- 
ers a little. But that's no argument why he should 
try to take the entire hide off of 'em. They tell me 
Bink's bookkeeper is a regular wizard when it 
comes to making up an account, 'specially for a 
stranger." He took a puff* or two at his cigar, 
meantime squinting across our weed-grown fields. 
"Don't I see 'Lonzo Begee chopping dead trees 
down there alongside the road?" 

"Yes; I believe that's his name. He only came 
to work for us this morning. Seems to be a hus- 
tler." 

"Does he, now? Well, ain't it a curious circum- 
stance how many fellers starting in at a new job 
just naturally work their heads off and wind up at 
the end of the second week loafing? Strikes me 
that's particularly the case with the farm laborers 
round here. Now you take 'Lonzo Begee's case. 
He never worked for me — I'm mighty careful about 
who I hire, lemme tell you! — but it always struck 
me as a strange thing that 'Lonzo changes jobs so 
often. I make it a point to keep an eye on what's 
happening in this neighborhood; and seems like 
[96] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

every time I run acrost him he's working in a dif- 
ferent place for a different party. 

"And yet you never can tell — he might turn out 
to be a satisfactory hand for you. Stranger things 
have happened. And besides, what suits one man 
don't suit another. I beheve in letting a man find 
out about these things for himself. The bitterer the 
experience and the more it costs him, the more likely 
he is to remember the lesson and profit by it. Don't 
you think so yourself?" 

I told him I thought so ; and presently he took his 
departure, after remarking that we had purchased 
a place with a good many possibilities in it ; though, 
from what he had heard, we probably paid too much 
for it, and he only hoped we didn't waste too much 
money in developing. He left me filled with so 
many doubts and so many misgivings that I felt 
congested. Within two days he was back, though, 
still actuated by the neighborly spirit, to warn me 
against a few more persons with whom we had al- 
ready had dealings, or with whom we expected to 
have dealings, or with whom conceivably we might 
some day have dealings. 

And within a week after that he returned a third 
time to put me on my guard against one or two 

[97] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

more individuals who somehow had been overlooked 
by him in his previous visits. Rarely did he come 
out in the open and accuse anybody of anything. 
He was too crafty, too subtle for that. The major 
was a regular sutler. But he certainly did under- 
stand the art of planting the poison. Give him time 
enough, and he could destroy a fellow's confidence 
in the entire human race. , 

He specialized in no single direction; his gifts 
were ample for all emergencies. When he tired of 
making you distrustful of those about you, or when 
temporarily he ran out of material, he knew the 
knack of making you distrustful of your own judg- 
ment. For example, there was the time, in the sec- 
ond month of our acquaintance I think it was, when 
he meandered in to inspect the work of renovation 
that had just been started on the stable. He spent 
perhaps ten minutes going over the premises, now 
and then uttering low, disparaging, clucking sounds 
under his breath. I followed him about fearsomely. 
I was distressed on account of the disclosures that I 
felt would presently be forthcoming. 

"Putting on a slate roof, eh?" he said when he 
was done with the investigation. "Expect it to stay 
put?" 
[98] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

I admitted that such had been the calculation of 
the builder. 

"Nothing like being one of these here optimists," 
he commented dryly. "But I want to tell you that 
it's the biggest mistake you ever made to put a slate 
roof on those sloping gables without sticking in 
some metal uprights to keep the snow from sliding 
off in a lump when the winter thaws come." 

It had always seemed to me that snow had few 
enough pleasures as it was. Though I had given 
the subject but little thought, it appeared to me 
that if sliding off a roof gave the snow any satisfac- 
tion it would ill become me or any one else to inter- 
fere. I ventured to say as much. 

**I guess you don't get my meaning," he ex- 
plained. "When the snow starts sliding, if there's 
enough of it, it's purty sure to take most of those 
slates along with it. And then where'U you be, I 
want to know?" 

"Is — is it too late to put up some anti-sliding 
thingumbobs now?" I asked. 

"Oh, yes," he said comfortingly ; "it's too late now 
unless you ripped the whole job off and started all 
over again. I judge you'll just have to let Nature 
take its course. I see you've got a chimney that 

[99] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

don't come over the ridge of the roof. Are you cal- 
culating that it'll draw?" 

*'I rather hoped it would — ^that was the intention, 
I believe." 

*'Well, then, you're in for another disappoint- 
ment there. But if I was you I shouldn't fret my- 
self about that, because it'll be some months yet be- 
fore you'll be building a fire in the fireplace, what 
with the warm weather just coming on; and you can 
have the top of the chimney lifted almost any time. 
. . . I don't want to alarm you needlessly; but it 
looks to me like mighty faulty drainpipes the 
plumber's been putting in for you. You'll have to 
snatch all that out before a great while and have 
new pipes put in proper. Don't it beat all what 
sharpers plumbers are? But then, they're no worse 
than other artisans, taking them by and large. F'r 
instance, what could be a worse job than that plas- 
tering in 3^our bedroom, or those tin gutters up yon- 
der at your eaves? The plastering may stay up a 
while, but the first good hard storm ought to bring 
the gutters down. I don't like your masonry work, 
either, if you're asking me for my opinion; and I 
see the carpenters are slipping in some mighty 
sorry-looking flooring on you," 
[100] 



HAPPY DAYS FOR MAJOR GLOOM 

I am not exaggerating. I am repeating, as ac- 
curately as I can, a conversation that really took 
place. 

For a while the major was in a fair way to spoil 
the present century for me. If the inhabitants of 
the countryside were in a conspiracy to strip the pel- 
fry off a fresh arrival and divide it among them as 
souvenirs, if there was no honesty left anywhere in 
a corrupted world, what, then, was the use of liv- 
ing? Why not commit suicide according to one of 
the standard methods and have done with the strug- 
gle, trusting that the undertaker would not be too 
much of a gouge and that the executors of the es- 
tate would leave a trifle of it for the widow and the 
orphan? 

But, after a spell, during which from the various 
firms, corporations and persons who had been tra- 
duced by him we uniformly had considerate and fair 
and scrupulously honorable treatment and service, 
we began to disregard the major's danger signals 
and to steer right past them. He, though, wearied 
not in well-doing. At every chance he dropped in, 
a poison viper disguised as a philanthropist, to hang 
another red light on the switch for us. It was in- 
evitable that his ministrations should get on our 

[101] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

nerves. I began to have visions centering about 
justifiable acts of homicide, always with the major 
for the chosen victim of my violence. 

It was after having such a dream that I figured 
myself as getting into George Creel's Despair As- 
sociation by virtue of having to stand trial over at 
White Plains for murder. As a matter of fact, I 
spared the major; and at last accounts he was still 
going to and fro in the land, planting slanders on 
all likely sites. I take it that there is one counter- 
part for him among every so many human beings; 
but it is in the country where every one has a chance 
to find out every one's business, and where the ex- 
cuses of being neighborly and friendly give him op- 
portunity for plying his trade that he is most in 
evidence. 



[102] 



CHAPTER V: IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 



CHAPTER V 

IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

We joined the Despair Association finally by- 
reason of our water problem. However, that was 
to come into our lives later. Through the spring- 
time we had more water than we could possibly 
hope to use, and we focused our attentions and our 
energies upon hacking a homestead out of the briar 
patch we had bought. 

A painful acre at a time, we cleared lands that 
once had been cleared. As I may have stated al- 
ready, forty-odd years of disuse had turned lawn 
space, garden space and meadow into one conglom- 
erate jungle of towering weeds and tangled thorny 
underbrush, stretching from the broken fences 
along the highroad straight back to the dooryard of 
the moldering tumbledown dwelling. With a gang 
of men under a competent foreman, and a double 
team of hired horses, we assaulted that tangle, 
bringing to the undertaking much of the same ardor 
and some of the same fortitude which I imagine 

[105] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

must have inspired Stanley on the day when he be- 
gan chopping his way through the trackless wilds of 
the dark forest to find Doctor Livingstone. 

It gave one the feeling of being a pioneer and a 
pathfinder — no, not a pathfinder; a pathmaker — to 
stand by, superintending in a large, broad, general, 
perfectly ignorant fashion the job of opening up 
those thickets of ours to the sunlight that had not 
visited them for ever so long. Off of one segment 
of our property, a slope directly behind the main 
house, we took over four hundred wagonloads of 
stumps, roots, trunks, boughs and brush — ^the fruit- 
age of nearly two months of steady labor on the 
part of men and horses. 

The brambles were shorn down and piled in heaps 
to be burned. The locusts, thousands of them, 
varying in size from half-grown trees to switchy 
saplings, were by main force snatched out of the 
ground bodily. A number of long-dead chestnuts 
and hickories, great unsightly snags that reared 
above the uptorn harried earth like monuments to 
past neglect, were felled and sawed into cordwood 
lengths aiid carted away. 

What emerged after these things had been done 
more than repaid us for all our pains. When the 
[106] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

rumpled soil had been smoothed back and plowed 
and harrowed, and sown to grass, and when the 
grass had sprouted as promptly as it did, there stood 
forth a dimpling green expanse where before had 
been a damp, moldy and almost impenetrable tan- 
gle, hiding treasure-troves of old tin cans, heaps of 
rusted and broken farming implements and here 
and there the bleached-out bones of a dead cow or 
a deceased horse. 

To our abounding astonishment, we found our- 
selves the owners of a considerable number of old 
but healthy apple trees and a whole grove of cherry 
trees that we hadn't known were there at all, so 
thoroughly had they been buried in the locusts and 
the sumacs. It was just like finding them. Indeed, 
it was finding them. 

The old house came down next, with some slight 
assistance from a crew of wreckers. Being almost 
ready to come down of its own accord it met them 
halfway. They had merely to pry into the founda- 
tions, hit her a hard wallop in the ribs, and then run 
for their lives. From the wreckage we reclaimed, 
out of the cellar, which was pre-Revolutionary, 
some hand-hewn oak beams in a perfect state of 
preservation; and out of the upper floors, which 

[107] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

were pre-James K. Polk, a quantity of interior 
trim, along with door frames and window sashes. 

Incidentally we dispossessed a large colony of 
rats and a whole synod of bats, a parish of yellow 
wasps and a small but active congregation of dis- 
senting cats — half-wild, glary-eyed, roach-backed, 
mangy cats that resided under the broken flooring. 
In all there were fourteen of these cats — swift and 
rangy performers, all of them. One and all, they 
objected to being driven from home. They hung 
about the razed wreckage, and by night they con- 
vened in due form upon a bare knoll hard by, and 
held indignation meetings. 

Parliamentary^ disputes arose frequently, with 
the result that the proceedings might be heard for a 
considerable distance. I took steps to break up 
these deliberations, and after several of the princi- 
pal debaters had met a sudden end — I am a very 
good wing shot on cats — ^the survivors saw their way 
clear to departing entirely from the vicinity. With- 
in a week thereafter the song birds, which until then 
had been strangely scarce upon the premises, heard 
the news, and began coming in swarms. We put up 
nesting boxes and feeding shelves, and long before 
June arrived we had hundreds of feathered board- 
[108] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

ers and a good many pairs of feathered tenants. 

One morning in the early part of the month of 
June I counted within sight at one time fourteen 
varieties of birds, including such brilliantly colored 
specimens as a scarlet tanager and his mate; a Bal- 
timore oriole ; a bluebird ; an indigo bunting ; a chat ; 
and a flicker — called, where I came from, a yellow 
hammer. Robins were probing for worms in the 
rank grass ; two brown thrashers and a black-billed 
cuckoo were investigating the residential possibili- 
ties of a cedar tree not far away; and from the 
woods beyond came the sound of a cock grouse 
drumming his amorous fanfare on a log. 

Think of what that meant to a man who, for the 
better part of twelve years, had been hived up in a 
flat, with English sparrows for company, when he 
craved a bit of wild life ! 

What had been a gardener's cottage stood at the 
roadside a hundred yards away from the site of 
the main house. On flrst examination it seemed fit 
only for the scrap heap; but one of those wise el- 
derly persons who are to be found in nearly every 
rural community — a genius who was part carpen- 
ter, part mason, part painter, part glazier and part 
plasterer — was called into consultation, and he de- 

[109] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

cided that, given time and material for mending, 
he might be able to do something with the shell. 
Modestly he called himself an odd- jobs man; really 
he was a doctor to decrepit and ailing structures. 

From neglect and dry rot the patient was almost 
gone ; but he nursed it back to a new lease on life, 
trepanning its top with new rafters, splinting its 
broken sides with new clapboards. He cured the 
cellar walls of rickets, the roof of baldness, and the 
inside woodwork of tetter ; and he so wrought with 
hammer and saw and nails, with lime and cement, 
with paintbrush and putty knife, that presently 
what had been a most disreputable blot on the land- 
scape became not only a livable little house but an 
exceedingly picturesque one, what with its wide 
overhanging gables, its cocky little front veranda, 
and its new complexion of roughcast stucco. 

While this transformation was accomplished in 
the lower field, we were doing things to the barn up 
on the hillside. It had good square lines, the barn 
had; and, though its outer casing was in a woeful 
state of nonrepair, its frame, having been built 
sixty or seventy years ago of splendid big timbers, 
stood straight and unskewed. Thanks to the abil- 
ity of our architect to dream an artistic dream and 
[110] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

then to create it, this structure, without impairment 
of its general lines and with no change at all in its 
general dimensions, presently became a combina- 
tion garage and bungalow. 

The garage part was down below, occupying the 
space formerly given over to horse stalls and cow 
sheds. Here, also, a furnace room, a laundry and 
a servant's room were built in. Above were the 
housekeeping quarters — three bedrooms ; two baths ; 
a big living hall, with a wide-mouthed fireplace in 
it ; a kitchen, and a pantry. This floor had been the 
haymow; but I'll warrant that if any of the long- 
vanished hay which once rested there could have re- 
turned it wouldn't have known the old place. 

The roof of the transmogrified mow was suffi- 
ciently high to permit the construction of a roomy 
attic, with accommodations for one sleeper at one 
end of it, and ample storage space besides. 

At the back of the building, where the teams had 
driven in, a little square courtyard of weathered 
brick was laid; a roof of rough Vermont slate was 
laid on in an irregular splotchy pattern of buff and 
yellow and black squares; and finally, upon the 
front, at the level of the second floor, the builder 
hung on a little Italian balcony, from which on 

[111] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

clear days, looking south down the Hudson, we 
have a forty-mile stretch of landscape and water- 
scape before us. 

On the nearer bank, two miles away, the spires 
of the market town show above the tree tops; on 
the further bank, six miles away, the rumpled blue 
outlines of the Ramapo Hills bulk up against the 
sky line ; and back of those hills are sunsets such as 
ambitious artists try, more or less unsuccessfully, 
to put on canvas. 

All this had not cost so much as it might have, 
because all the interior trim, all the doors and win- 
dows, and all the studs and joists and beams had 
been reclaimed from the demolished main building. 
The chief extravagances had been a facing of stone- 
work for the garage front and a stucco dress for the 
upper walls. We broke camp and moved in. 

For a month or so we went along swinmiingly. 
One morning we quit swimming. All of a sudden 
we woke up to find there was no longer sufficient 
water for aquatic pastimes. 

The absolutely unprecedented dry spell that oc- 
curs every second or third year in this part of the 
North Temperate Zone had descended upon us, 
taking us, as it were, unawares. The brooks were 
[112] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

going dry; the grass on hillsides where the soil was 
thin turned from a luscious green to a parched 
brown ; and the mother spring of our seven up the 
valley, which had gushed so plenteously, now dimin- 
ished overnight, as it were, into a puny runlet. 
There were no indications that the spring would be 
absolutely dry; but there was every indication that 
it would continue to lessen in the volume of its 
output — which it did. We summoned friends and 
well-wishers into consultation, and by them were 
advised to dig an artesian well. 

We did not want to bother with artesian wells 
then. We were living verjr comfortably upstairs 
over the garage and we were planning the house we 
meant to build. We had drawn plans, and yet more 
plans, torn them up and started all over again ; and 
had found doing this to be one of the deepest pleas- 
ures of life. Time without end we had conferred 
with friends who had built houses of their own, and 
who gave us their ideas of the things which would 
be absolutely indispensable to our comfort and hap- 
piness in our new house. We had incorporated 
these ideas with a few of our own, and then we had 
found that if we meant to construct a house which 
would please all concerned, ourselves included, 

[113] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

there would be needed a bond issue to float the en- 
terprise and the completed structure would be 
about the size of a cathedral. So then we would 
trim down, paring off a breakfast porch here and a 
conservatory there, until we had a design for a 
compact edifice not much larger than an average- 
sized railroad terminal. 

Between times, when not engaged in the pleasing 
occupation of building our house on paper, we 
chose the site where it should stand. This, also, con- 
sumed a good many days, because each time we de- 
cided on a different location. One of our favorite 
recreations was shifting the house we meant to build 
about from place to place. We put imaginary 
wheels under that imaginary home of ours and kept 
it traveling all over the farm. The trouble with us 
was we had too much latitude. With half an acre 
of land at our disposal, we should have been circum- 
scribed by boundary lines. On half an acre you 
have to be reasonably definite about where you are 
going to build; slide too far one way or the other, 
and you are committing trespass, and litigation 
ensues. But we had sixty acres from which to pick 
and to choose — sixty acres, with desirable sites scat- 
tered all over the tract. 
[114] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

No sooner had we absolutely and positively set- 
tled on one spot as the spot where the house must 
stand than we would find half a dozen others equally 
desirable, or even more so; and then, figuratively 
speaking, we would pick up the establishment and 
transport it to one of the newly discovered spots, 
and wheel it round to face in a different direction 
from the direction in which it had just been facing. 
If a thing that does not yet physically exist may 
have sensations, the poor dizzy thing must have felt 
as if it were a merry-go-round. 

Likewise we were very busy putting in our road. 
Up until a short time ago Miss Anna Peck, who 
makes a specialty of scaling supposedly inaccessi- 
ble crags, was probably the only living person who 
could have derived any pleasure from penetrating 
to our mountain fastness, either afoot or otherwise. 
When we heard an engine in difficulties coughing 
down under the hill, followed by the sound of a tire 
blowing out, or by the smell of rubber scorching as 
the brakes clamped into the fabric, we knew some 
of our friends had been reckless enough to under- 
take to climb up by motor. So, unless we wanted 
to become hermits, we felt it incumbent upon us 
to put in a road. 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

When we got the estimates on the job we de- 
cided that the contractor must have figured on 
building our road of chalcedony or onyx or moss 
agate or some other of the semi-precious stones. It 
didn't seem possible that he meant to use any native 
material — at that price. It turned out, though, 
that his bid was fairly moderate — as processed blue- 
stone roads go in this climate ; and ours has cost us 
only about eight times as much as I had previously 
supposed a replica of the Appian Way would cost. 
However, it has been pronounced a very good road 
by critics who should know; not a fancy road, but 
a fair average one. 

It would look smarter, of course, with wide brick 
gutters down either side of it for its entire length; 
and I should add brick gutters, too, if I were as 
comfortably fixed, say, as Mr. Charles Schwab, and 
felt sure that I could get some of the Vanderbilt 
boys to help me out in case I ran short of funds 
before the job was completed. Still, for persons 
who live simply it does very well. 

With all these absorbing employments to engage 

us, we naturally were loath to turn our attentions 

to water. We had lived too long in a flat where, 

when you wanted water, you merely turned a fau- 

[116] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

cet. To us water had always been a matter of 
course. But now the situation was different. With 
each succeeding day the flow from our spring was 
slackening. In its present puniness it was no more 
than a reminder of the brave stream of the spring- 
time. 

There was a water witch, so called, in the neigh- 
borhood — a gentleman water witch. We were 
recommended to avail ourselves of his services. It 
was his custom, we were told, to arm himself with 
a forked peach-tree switch and walk about over the 
land, holding the wand in front of him by its two 
prongs, meantime muttering strange incantations. 
When he came to a spot where water lay close to the 
surface the other end of his divining rod would 
dip magically toward the earth. You dug there, 
and if you struck water the magician took the credit 
for it; and if you didn't strike water it was a sign 
the peach-tree switch had wilfully deceived its pro- 
prietor, and he cut a fresh twig off another and 
more dependable tree and gave you a second demon- 
stration at half rates. However, before opening 
negotiations with this person, I bethought me to 
interview the man who had contracted to do the 
boring. 

[117] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

The latter gentleman proved to be the most non- 
committal man I ever met in my life. He was as 
chary about making predictions as to the result of 
operations in his line as the ticket agent of a jerk- 
water railroad down South is about estimating the 
probable time of arrival of the next passenger train 
— always conceding that there is to be any next 
train ; and that is as chary as any human being can 
possibly be. Only upon one thing was he positive, 
which was that no peach-tree switch in the world 
could be educated up to the point where it could 
find water that was hidden underground. 

Man and boy, he had been boring wells for thirty 
years, he said; and it was all guess. One shaft 
would be put down — at three dollars a foot — until 
it pierced the roof of Tophet, and the only resultant 
moisture would be night sweats for the unhappy 
party who was footing the bills. Or the same pros- 
pector might dig his estate so full of circular holes 
that it would resemble honeycomb tripe, and never 
get anything except monthly statements for the 
work to date. On the other hand, a luckier man, 
living right across the way, had been known to start 
sinking a shaft, and before the drill had gone 
twenty feet it became necessary to remove the 

[118] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

women and children to a place of safety until the 
geyser had been throttled down. 

This particular well digger's business, as he him- 
self explained, was digging wells, not filling them 
after they were dug. He guaranteed to make a 
hole in the ground of suitable caliber for an arte- 
sian well, but Nature and Providence must do the 
rest. With this understanding, he fetched up his 
outfit and greased himself and the machinery all 
over, and announced that he was ready to start. 

So we picked out a spot where it would be con- 
venient to build a pump house afterward, and he 
fixed up the engine and began grinding away. And 
he ground and ground and ground. Every morn- 
ing, whistling a cheerful air, he would set his drills 
in circular motion, and all day he would keep it 
turning and turning. At eventide I would call on 
him and he would report progress — he had ad- 
vanced so many feet or so many yards in a southerly 
direction and had encountered such and such a for- 
mation. 

"Any water?" At first I would put up the ques- 
tion hopefully, then nervously, and finally for the 
sake of regularity merely. 

"No water," he would reply blithely; "but this 

[119] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

afternoon about three o'clock I hit a stratum of the 
prettiest white quartz you ever saw in your hfe." 

And, with the passion of the born geologist 
gleaming in his eye, he would pick up a handful of 
shining specimens and hold them out for me to ad- 
mire ; but I am afraid that toward the last any en- 
thusiasm displayed by me was more or less forced. 

And the next night it would be red sandstone, 
or gray mica, or sky-blue schist, or mottled granite, 
or pink iron ore — or something! This abandoned 
farm of ours certainly proved herself to be a mighty 
variegated mineral prospect. In the course of four 
weeks that six-inch hole brought forth silver and 
solder, soda and sulphur, borax and soapstone, 
crystal and gravel, amalgam fillings and a very fair 
grade of moth balls. 

It brought forth nearly everything that may be 
found beneath the surface of the earth, I think, ex- 
cept radium — and water. On second thought, I am 
not so sure about the radium. It occurs to me that 
we did strike a trace of something resembling ra- 
dium at the two-hundred-foot level — I won't be 
positive. But I am absolutely sure about the water. 
There wasn't any. 

At the end of a long and expensive month we 
[120] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

abandoned that hole, fruitful though it was in min- 
eral wealth, moved the machinery a hundred yards 
west, and began all over again. We didn't get any 
water here, either; but before we quit we ran into 
a layer of wonderful white marble. If anybody 
ever discovers a way of getting marble for monu- 
ments and statuary out of a hole six inches in diam- 
eter and a hundred and seventy-five feet deep our 
fortunes are made. We have the hole and the mar- 
ble at the bottom of it; all he will have to provide 
is the machinery. 

By now we were desperate, but determined. We 
sent word to George Creel to rush us application 
blanks for membership in his Despair Association, 
We transferred the digging apparatus to a point 
away down in the valley, and the contractor retuned 
his engine and inserted a new steel drill — his other 
one had been worn completely out — and we began 
boring a third time. And three weeks later — oh, 
frabjous joy! — ^we struck water — plenteous oodles 
of it; cold, clear and pure. And then we broke 
ground for our new house. 

That isn't all — by no means is it all. Free from 
blight, our potatoes are in the bin ; our apples have 
been picked; and our corn has been gathered, and, 

[121] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

in a rich golden store, it fills our new corncrib. We 
are eating our own chickens and our own eggs; we 
are drinking milk from our own cow; and we are 
living on vegetables of our own raising. 

Until now I never cared deeply for turnips. 
Turnips, whether yellow or white, meant little in 
my life. But now I know that was because they 
were strange turnips, not turnips which had grown 
in our own soil and for which I could have almost 
a paternal affection. Last night for dinner I ate 
a derby hatful of mashed turnips, size seven and an 
eighth. 

Let the servants quit now if they will — and do. 
Only the day before yesterday the laundres^s walked 
out on us. It was our new laundress, who had suc- 
ceeded the old laundress, the one who stayed with 
us for nearly two consecutive weeks before the 
country life palled upon her sensitive spirit. And 
the day before that we lost a perfect treasure of a 
housemaid. She disliked something that was said 
by some one occupying the comparatively unimpor- 
tant position of a member of the family, and she 
took umbrage and some silverware and departed 
from our fireside. We've had our troubles with 
cooks, too. 
[122] 



IN WHICH WE BORE FOR WATER 

When the latest one showed signs of a gnawing 
discontent I offered to take lessons on the ukulele 
and play for her in the long winter evenings that 
are now upon us. I suggested that we think up 
charades and acrostics — I am very fertile at acros- 
tics — and have anagram parties now and then to 
while away the laggard hours. But no ; she felt the 
call of the city and she must go. We are expecting 
a fresh candidate to-morrow. We shall try to make 
her stay with us, however brief, a pleasant one. 

But these domestic upsets are to us as nothing 
at all; for we have struck water, and we are living, 
in part at least, on our own home-grown provender, 
and shortly we shall start the home of our dreams. 
And to-day something else happened that filled our 
cup of joy to overflowing. In the middle of the 
day a dainty little doe came mincing down through 
our garden just as confidently as though she owned 
the place. 

We are less than an hour by rail from the Grand 
Central Station; and yet, as I write this line, a 
lordly cock grouse is strutting proud and unafraid 
through the undergrowth not fifty yards from m}^ 
workroom! Last night, when I opened my bed- 
room window — in the garage — to watch the distant 

[123] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

reflection of the New York lights, flickering against 
the sky to the southward, I heard a dog fox yelping 
in the woods! 

Let Old Major Gloom, the human Dismal 
Swamp, come over now as often as pleases him. 
Our chalice is proof against his poison. 



[124] 



CHAPTER VI: TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 



CHAPTER VI 

TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

As the reader will have no trouble in recalling, 
we broke ground for our house. That, however, 
was after we had altered the design so often that 
the first lot of plans and specifications got ver- 
tigo and had to be retired in favor of a new set. 
For one thing, we snatched one entire floor out of 
the original design — just naturally jerked it out 
from under and cast it away and never missed it 
either. And likewise this was after we had shifted 
the site of the house from one spot to another spot 
and thence to a third likely spot, and finally back 
again to the first spot. This, however, had one 
thing in its favor at least. It enabled us to do our 
moving without taking our household goods from 
storage, and yet during the same period to enjoy 
all the pleasurable thrill of shifting about from 
place to place. I find moving in your mind is a 
much less expensive way than the other way is 
and gives almost as much pleasure to a woman, 

[127] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

who — being a woman — is naturally a mover at 
heart. 

Finally, though, all this preliminary skirmishing 
came to an end and we actually started work on our 
house. I should say, we started work on what for- 
merly we had thought was going to be our house. 
It turned out we were wrong. As it stands to-day, 
two years after the beginning, in a state approach- 
ing completion, it is a very satisfactory sort of house 
we think, artistically as well as from the standpoint 
of being practical and comfortable; but it is no 
longer entirely our house. The architect is re- 
sponsible for the general scheme of things, for the 
layout and the assembling of the wood and the 
brick and the cement and the stonework and all that 
sort of thing, and to him largely will attach the 
credit if the effect within and without should prove 
pleasing to the eye. Likewise, here and there are to 
be found the traces of ideas which we ourselves had, 
but I must confess the structure is also a symposium 
of the modified ideas of our friends and well-wishers 
mated to our ideas. 

To me human nature presents a subject for con- 
stant study. For a thing so widely distributed as 
it is, I regard it as one of the most interesting things 
[128] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

there are anywhere. It seems to me one of the chief 
pecuHarities of human nature is that it divides all 
civilized mankind into two special groups — those 
who think they could run any newspaper better 
than the man who is trying to run it, and those who 
think they could run any hotel better than the man 
who is hanging on as manager or proprietor of it. 
There are subdivisional classifications of course — 
for example, women who think they can tell any 
other woman how to bring up her children without 
spoiling them to death, and women who are abso- 
lutely sure no woman on earth can tell them any- 
thing about the right way to bring up their own 
children; which two groupings include practically 
all women. And I have yet to meet the man who 
did not believe that he was a good judge of either 
horses, diamonds, wines, women, salad dressings, 
antique furniture. Oriental rugs or the value of real 
estate. And finally all of these, regardless of sex 
and regardless, too, of previous experience in the 
line, know better how a house intended for living 
purposes should be designed and arranged than the 
individuals who are paying the bills and who expect 
to tenant the house as a home when it is done. By 
the same token — or by the inverse ratio of the same 

[129] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

token — ^the persons who are building the house in- 
variably begin to have doubts and misgivings re- 
garding the worth of their own pet notions in re- 
gard to the said house the moment some outsider 
offers a counter argument. I do not know why this 
la-st should be so, but it is. It merely is one of the 
inexplicable phases of the common phenomenon 
called human nature. 

In our own case the force of this fact applied 
with a pronounced emphasis. When the tentative 
draft of the house of our dreams was offered for our 
inspection it seemed to us a gem — perfect, precious 
and rare. Filled with pride as we were, we showed 
the drawings to every one who came to see us. Get- 
ting out the drawings when somebody called be- 
came a regular habit with us. Being ourselves so 
deeply interested in them, we couldn't understand 
why our friends shouldn't be interested too. And 
they were — I'll say that much for them ; they were 
all interested. And why not? For one thing, it 
gave them a chance to show how right they were 
regarding the designing of a house; not our house 
particularly, but an}i;hing under a roof, ranging 
from St. Peter's at Rome to the facade of the gov- 
ernment fish hatchery in Tupelo, Mississippi. For 
[130] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

another thing, it gave them a chance to show us 
how completely wrong we were on this subject. 
Not a single soul among them but pounced at the 
opportunity. Until then I never realized how many 
born pouncers — not amateur pouncers but profes- 
sional expert master pouncers — I numbered in my 
acquaintance. Right from the beginning the pro- 
cedure followed a certain ritual. A caller or 
pouncer would drop in and have off his things and 
get comfortably settled. We would produce the 
sketches, fondling them lovingly, and spread them 
out and invite the attention of our guest to prob- 
ably the only perfect design of a house fashioned 
by the mind of man since the days of the mound 
builders on this hemisphere. In our language we 
may not have gone quite so far as to say all this, 
but our manner indicated that such was the case. 

He — for convenience in the illustration I shall 
make him a man, though in the case of a woman the 
outcome remained the same — he would consider 
the matchless work of inventive art presented for 
his consideration and then he would say: 

**An awfully nice notion — splendid, perfectly 

splendid! And still, you know, if I were " 

And so on. 

[131] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

Or perhaps it would be: "Oh, I like the general 
idea immensely 1 But — you'll pardon my making 
a little suggestion, won't you? — but if I were tack- 
ling this proposition " And so on. 

It has been my observation that all complimen- 
tary remarks uttered by a member of the human 
race in connection with a house which somebody 
else contemplates building end in "but." 

You just simply can't get away from it. 

From the treasure-troves of my memory I con- 
tinue to quote: 

"But if I were tackling this proposition I would 
certainly not put the dining room here were you've 
got it. I'd switch it over there right next to the 
living room and give a vista through. See, like 
this!" 

And out would come his lead pencil, 

"But that would mean eliminating the main hall," 
one of us would venture. 

"Of course it would," Brother Pounce would 
say. "Next to giving a vista through, cutting out 
the hall is the principal idea I had in mind. What 
do you want with a hall here? For that matter, 
what do you want with a hall any place that you 
can get along without it? Why, my dear people, 
[132] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

don't you know that hallways are no earthly good 
except to catch dust and be drafty and make extra 
work for servants? And besides, in modern houses 
people are cutting the hallways down to a minimum 
— to an absolute minimum." 

We gathered that in a modern house — and, of 
course, a modern house was what we devoutly 
craved to own — persons going from one part of it 
to another didn't pass through a hall any more; 
they passed through a minimum. The idea seemed 
rather revolutionary to persons reared — as we had 
been — in houses with halls in them. Still, this per- 
son spoke as one having authority and we would lis- 
ten with due respect to his words as he went on : 

*'A11 right, then, we'll consider the hallway as 
chopped out. By chopping it out that gives us a 
chance to put the dining room here in this place and 
give a vista through into the living room. Here, 
I'll show you exactly what I mean — what did I do 
with my lead pencil? Because no matter what else 
you do or do not have, you must have a vista 
through." 

Before he had finished with this alteration and 
taken up with the next one we were made to under- 
stand that a house without a vista through was sub- 

[133] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

stantially the same as no house at all. Ashamed 
that we had been guilty of so gross an oversight, I 
would make a note, "Vista through," on a scratch 
pad which I kept for that very purpose. Under the 
spell of his eloquence and compelling personality, I 
had already decided that first we vv^ould build a vista 
through, and then after that if any money was left 
we would sort of flank the vista through with bed- 
rooms and a kitchen and other things of a compara- 
tively incidental nature. 

Having scored this important point, the king of 
the pouncers — now warming to his work and with 
his eyes feverishly lit by the enthusiasm of the 
zealot — would proceed to claw the quivering giblets 
out of another section of our plan. Hark to him: 

"And say, see here now, how about your sun par- 
lor? I can see two — no, three places suitable for 
tacking on a sun parlor merely by moving some 
walls round and putting the main entrance at the 
east front instead of the south front — funny the 
architect didn't think of that! He should have 
thought of that the very first thing if he calls him- 
self a regular architect — and I suppose he does. 
What's the idea, leaving off the sun parlor?" 

Then weakly, with an inner sinking of the heart, 
[134] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

we would confess that we had not calculated on in- 
cluding any sun parlors in the general scope and he 
for his part would proceed to show us how deadly 
an omission, how grievous an offense this would be. 
It is a curious psychological paradox that we 
dreaded these suggestions and yet welcomed them, 
too. That is to say, we would begin by dreading 
them — ^resenting them would perhaps be a better 
term^ — and invariably would wind up by welcoming 
them. Nevertheless, there were times when I gave 
my celebrated imitation of the turning worm. 
Jarred off my mental balance by a proposed change 
which seemed entirely contrary to the trend of the 
style of house we had in mind for our house, I would 
offer at the outset a faint counter argument in de- 
fense, especially if a notion which was about to be 
offered as a sacrifice on the altar of friendly counsel 
had been a favorite little idea of my own — one that 
I had found in my own head, as the saying went 
in the Army. Though knowing in advance that I 
was fighting a losing fight, I would raise a meek 
small voice in protest. Never once did my protest- 
ing avail. There was one stock answer which my 
fellow controversialist always had handy — ^ready to 
belt me with, 

[135] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

"One moment!" he would say, smiling the su- 
perior half-pitying smile which was really responsi- 
ble for Cain's killing Abel that time. 

Abel smiled just exactly in that way and so Cain 
killed him, and if you're asking me, he got exactly 
what was coming to him. "One moment !" he would 
say. "You've never built a house before, have 
you?" 

"No," I would confess, "but— but " 

"Then, pardon me, but I have! What I am try- 
ing to do is to keep you from making the mistakes 
I made. Almost anybody will make mistakes build- 
ing his first house. I only wish I'd had somebody 
round to advise me as I'm advising you before I 
O. K.'d the plans and signed the contract. As it 
was, it cost me four thousand dollars to pull out two 
walls so that we could have a sun parlor. If you 
go ahead and build your house without having a 
sun parlor you'll never regret it but once — and 
that'll be all the time you live in it. Look here 
now, while I show you how easily you can do it." 
And so on and so forth until we would capitulate 
and I'd w^ite "Memo — sun parlor, sure," on my lit- 
tle pad. 

Take for example the matter of sleeping porches. 
[136] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

Personally I have never been drawn greatly to the 
idea of sleeping outdoors. I used to think an out- 
door bedroom must be almost as inconvenient as an 
outdoor bathroom, and with me bathing has always 
been a solitary pleasure. I have felt that I would 
not be at my best while bathing before an audience. 
That may denote selfishness on my part, but such 
is my nature and I cannot change it. I suppose this 
prejudice against bathing before a crowd is consti- 
tutional with me — hereditary, as it were. All my 
folks were awfully peculiar that way. 

When they felt that they needed bathing they 
also felt that they needed privacy. I sometimes 
think that my family must have been descended 
from Susanna. She was a Biblical lady and so did 
not have any last name, but you probably recall her 
from the circumstance of her having been surprised 
while bathing by two snoopy elders. Whenever one 
of the Old Masters ran out of other subjects to 
paint, he would paint a picture of Susanna and the 
elders. In no two of their pictures did she look 
alike, but in all of them that IVe ever seen she 
looked embarrassed. Yes, 1 dare say Susanna was 
our direct ancestress. Like practically all Southern 
families, ours is a very old family and IVe always 

[137] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

been led to believe that we go back a long way. 
True, I've never heard the Old Testament men- 
tioned in this connection, but in view of the fact of 
our family being such an old or Southern family I 
reckon it is but fair to presume that we go back 
fully that far if not farther. 

Indeed I have been told that in my infancy a 
friend of the family, a man who had delved rather 
into archeology, on calling one day remarked that 
I had a head shaped exactly like a cuneiform Chal- 
dean brick. It was years later, however, before my 
parents learned what a cuneiform Chaldean brick 
looked like and by that time the person who had 
paid me the compliment was dead and it was too 
late to take offense at him. And anyhow, in the 
meantime the contour of my skull had so altered 
that it was now possible for me to wear a regular 
child's hat bought out of a store. I point out the 
circumstance merely as possible collateral evidence 
showing semiprehistoric hereditary influences to cor- 
roborate the more or less direct evidence that as a 
family we antedate nearly all — if not all — of these 
Northern families by going back into the very dawn 
of civilization. I have a great aunt who rather 
specializes in genealogies and especially our own 
[138] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

genealogy and the next time I see her I mean to ask 
her to consult the authorities and find out whether 
there is a strain of the Susanna blood in our stock. 
If she confirms my present belief that there is I 
shall be very glad to let everybody know about it 
in an appendix to the next edition of this work. 

As with taking a bath outdoors, so with sleeping 
outdoors ; this always was my profound conviction. 
I had a number of arguments, all good arguments 
I thought, to offer in support of my position. To 
begin with, I am what might be called a sincere 
sleeper, a whole-souled sleeper. I have been told 
that when I am sleeping and the windows are open 
everybody in the vicinity knows I am actually 
sleeping and not lying there tossing about rest- 
lessly upon my bed. I would not go so far as to 
say that I snore, but like most deep thinkers I 
breathe heavily when asleep. On board a sleeping 
car I have been known to breathe even more heavily 
than the locomotive did. I know of this only by 
hearsay, but when twenty or thirty passengers, all 
strangers to you, unite in a common statement to 
the same eiFect you are bound to admit, if you have 
any sense of fairness in your make-up, that there 
must be an element of truth in what they allege. 

[139] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

Very well, then, let us concede that I sleep with 
the muffier cut out open. In view of this fact I 
have felt that I would not care to sleep in the open 
where my style of slee]3ing might invite adverse 
comment. In such a matter I try to have a proper 
consideration for the feelings of others. Indeed I 
carried it to such a point that when we lived in 
the closely congested city, with neighboring flat 
dwellers just across a narrow courtyard, I placedj 
the head of my bed in such a position that I might 
do the bulk of my breathing up the chimney. 

Besides — so I was wont to argue — what in thun- 
der was the good of having a comfortable cozy 
bedroom with steam heat and everything in it, and 
a night lamp for reading if one felt like reading, 
and a short cut down to the pantry if one felt hun- 
gry in the small hours, and then on a cold night 
deliberately to crawl out on a wind-swept porch 
hung against the outer wall of the house and sleep 
there? I once knew one of these sleeping-porch 
fiends who was given to boasting that in wintertime 
he often woke to find the snow had drifted in on the 
top of him while he slept. He professed to like the 
sensation; he bragged about it. From his remarks 
you gleaned that his idea of a really attractive bou- 
[140] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

doir was the polar bear's section up at the Bronx 
Zoo. I was sorry his name had not been Moe in- 
stead of Joe — which was what it was — because if it 
had only been the former I had thought up a clever 
play on words. I was going to catch him in company 
and trap him into boasting about loving to sleep in 
a snowdrift and then I was going to call him Es- 
kimo, which should have been good for a laugh every 
time it was spontaneously sprung on a fresh audi- 
ence. 

In short, taking one thing with another, I have 
never favored sleeping porches. But after listening 
to friends who either had them or who were so sorry 
they didn't have them that they were determined we 
should have a full set of them on our house, we con- 
curred in the consensus of opinion and decided to 
cast aside old prejudices and to have them at all 
hazards. I believe in the rule of the majority — of 
course with a few private reservations from time to 
time, as for instance, when the majority gets car- 
ried away by this bone-dry notion. 

I recall in particular one friend who was espe- 
cially emphatic and especially convincing in the 
details of offering suggestions and advice, and 
— where he deemed such painful measures neces- 

[141] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

sary — in administering reproof for and correc- 
tion of our faulty misconceptions of what a house 
should be. But then he was a Bostonian by 
birth and a Harvard graduate and had the manner 
— shall we call it the slightly superior manner? — 
which so often marks one who may boast these two 
quahfications. When you meet a well-bred native 
Bostonian who has been through Harvard it is 
as though you had met an egg which had enjoyed 
the unique distinction of having been laid twice and 
both times successfully. Our friend was distinctly 
that way. When he had rendered judgment there 
was no human appeal. It never occurred to us 
there could be any appeal. 

So we incorporated sleeping porches and vistas 
through and sun parlors and a hundred other things 
— more or less — into the plan. Obeying the wills 
of stronger natures than ours, we figuratively 
knocked out walls and then on subsequent and what 
appeared to be superior counsel figuratively stuck 
them back in again. We lifted the roof for air and 
we lowered it for style. We tiled the floors and 
then untiled them and put down beautiful mental 
hardwood all over the place. We rejected paneled 
wainscotings in favor of rough-cast plaster and then 
[142] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

abolished the plaster for something in the nature 
of a smooth finish for our walls. By direction we 
tacked on an ell here and an annex there. If we 
had kept all the additions which at one period or 
another we were quite sure we must keep in order 
to make our home complete we should have had a 
house entirely unsuitable for persons of our position 
in life to reside in, but could have made consider- 
able sums of money by renting it out for national 
conventions. 

On one point and only one point did we remain 
adamant. Otherwise we were as clay in the hands 
of the potter, as flax to the loom of the weaver; 
but there we were as adamant as an ant. We con- 
curred in the firm and unswervable decision that — 
no matter what else we might have or might not 
have in our house — we would not have a den in it. 
By den I mean one of those cubby-holes opening 
off a living room or an entrance hall that is fitted 
up with woolly hangings and an Oriental smoking 
set where people are supposed to go and sit when 
they wish to be comfortable — only nobody in his 
right mind ever does. In my day I have done too 
much traveling on the Pullman of commerce to 
crave to have a section of one in my home. Call 

[143] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

them dens if you will; I know a sleeping-car com- 
partment when I see it, even though it be thinly 
disguised by a pair of trading-stamp scimitars 
crossed over the door and a running yard of mail- 
order steins up on a shelf. Several earnest advo- 
cates of the den theory tried their persuasive pow- 
ers on us, but each time one or the other of us 
turned a deaf ear. When her deaf ear was tired 
from turning I would turn mine a while, and vice 
versa. There is no den in our home. Except over 
my dead body there never shall be one. 

While on this general subject I may add that if 
anybody succeeds in sticking a Japanese catalpa 
on our lawn it will also be necessary to remove my 
lifeless but still mutely protesting remains before 
going ahead with the planting. I have accepted the 
new state income tax in the spirit in which it seems 
to be meant — ^namely, to confiscate any odd far- 
things that may still be knocking round the place 
after the Federal income tax has been paid, and a 
very sound notion, too. What is money for if it 
isn't for legislators to spend? Should the Prohibi- 
tionists put through the seizure-and-search law as 
a national measure I suppose in time I may get 
accustomed to waking up and finding a zealous gent 
[144] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

with a badge and one of those long prehensile noses 
especially adapted for poking into other people's 
businesses, such as so many professional uplifters 
have, prowling through the place on the lookout 
for a small private bottle labeled "Spirits Aromatic 
Ammonia, Aged in the Wood." With the passage 
of time I may become really enthusiastic over the 
prospect of having my baggage ransacked for con- 
traband essences every time I cross the state line. 
My taste in pyjamas has been favorably commented 
on and there is no reason why my fellow travelers 
should not enjoy a treat as the inspector dumps the 
contents of the top tray out on the car floor. The 
main thing is to get used to whatever it is that we 
have got to get used to. 

But I have a profound conviction that in the mat- 
ter of a Japanese catalpa on the lawn, just as in 
the matter of a den opening off the living room and 
taking up the space which otherwise would make a 
first-rate umbrella-and-galosh closet, I could never 
hope to get used. Nor do I yearn for a weeping 
mulberry tree about the premises. I dislike its 
prevalent shape and the sobbing sound it makes 
when especially moved by the distress which chron- 
ically afflicts the sensitive thing. Nature endowed 

[145] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

our abandoned farm with a plenteous selection of 
certain deciduous growths common to the temper- 
ate zone — elms and maples and black walnuts and 
hickories and beeches and birches and dogwoods and 
locusts; also pines and hemlocks and cedars and 
spruces. What the good Lord designed as suitable 
arboreal adornment for the eastern seaboard is 
good enough for me. I have no desire to clutter up 
the small section of North America to which I hold 
the title deeds with trees which do not match in with 
the rest of North America. I should as soon think 
of putting a pagoda on top of Pike's Peak or con- 
necting the Thousand Islands with a system of per- 
golas. 

Having got that out of my system, let us get off 
the grounds and back to the house proper. As I 
was remarking just before being diverted from the 
main line, a den was about the only voluntary offer- 
ing which we positively refused to take over. 
Every other notion of whatsoever nature was duly 
adopted and duly carried on to the architect. He 
was a wonderful man. All architects, I am con- 
vinced, must be wonderful men, but him I would 
call one of the pick of his breed. How he managed 
to make practical use of some of the ideas we 
[146] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

brought to him and fit them into the plan; how 
without hurting our feehngs or the feehngs of our 
friends he succeeded in curing us of sundry delu- 
sions we had acquired ; how he succeeded in confin- 
ing the gi^ound plan to a scale which would not 
make the New York Public Library seem in com- 
parison a puny and inconsequential edifice; and 
how taking a number of the suggestions which 
came to him and rejecting the others he yet pre- 
served the structural balance and the suitable pro- 
portions which he had had in his mind all along — 
these, to my way of thinking, approximate the 
Eighth Wonder. No, it is the first wonder; the 
remaining seven finish place, show and also ran. 

After a season of debate, compromise and concil- 
iation, when the gray in his hair had perceptibly 
thickened and the lines in his face had deepened, 
though still he wore his chronic patient smile which 
makes strangers like him, the final specifications 
were blue-printed and the work was started. A 
lady to whom I have the honor of being very closely 
related by marriage removed the first shovel load 
of loam from the contemplated excavation. She is 
not what you would call a fancy shoveler and the 
net result of her labor, I should say offhand, was 

[147] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

about a heaping dessert-spoonful of topsoil. Had 
I guessed what that inconsequential pinch of earth 
would subsequently mean to us in joy I should have 
put it in a snuffbox and carried it about with me as 
the first tangible souvenir of a great accomplish- 
ment and a reminder to me never again to look 
shghtingly upon small things. Bulk does not 
necessarily imply ultimate achievement. If Tom 
Thumb had been two feet taller and eighteen inches 
broader than he was I doubt whether he would 
amounted to much as a dwarf. 

Well, we reared the foundations and then one 
fine April morning our country abandoned its pol- 
icy of watchful waiting for one of swatful hating. 
While we were at war it did not seem patriotic to 
try to go ahead. There was another reason — a va- 
riety of reasons rather. Very soon labor was not to 
be had, or materials either. Take the detail of con- 
crete. Now that the last war is over and the next 
war not as yet started, I violate no confidence and 
betray no trust in stating that one of our chief mili- 
tary secrets had to do with this seemingly harmless 
product. We were shooting concrete at the Ger- 
mans. In large quantities it was fatal; in small, 
mussy. And while the Germans were digging the 
[148] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

gummy stuff out of their eyes and their hair our 
fellows would swarm over the top and capture 
them. And if you are not sure that I am telling 
the exact truth regarding this I only wish you had 
tried during active hostilities — as I did — to buy a 
few jorums and noggins of concrete. Trying would 
have made a true believer of you, too. And the 
same might be said for steel girders and cow hair 
to put into piaster so it will stick, and ten-penny 
nails. We were firing all these things at the enemy. 
It must have disconcerted him terribly to be expect- 
ing high explosives and have a keg of ten-penny 
nails or a* bale of cow hair burst in his midst. With- 
out desire to detract from the glory of the other 
branches of the service, I am of the opinion that it 
was ten-penny nails that won the war. And in 
bringing about this splendid result I did my share 
by not buying any in large amount for going on 
eighteen months. 

I couldn't. 

War having come and concrete having gone, the 
contractor on our little job knocked off operations 
until such time as Germany had been cured of what 
principally ailed her. Even through the delay, 
though, we found pleasure in our project. We 

[U9] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

would perch perilously upon the top of the jagged 
walls and enjoy the view the while we imagined we 
sat in our finished dream house. We could see it, 
even if no one else could. In rainy weather we 
brought umbrellas along. The fact that a passer- 
by beheld us thus on a showery afternoon I sup- 
pose was responsible for the report which spread 
through the vicinity that a couple of lunatics were 
roosting on some stone ruins halfway up the side of 
Mott's Mountain. We didn't mind though. The 
great creators of this world have ever been the vic- 
tims of popular misunderstanding. Sir Isaak Wal- 
ton, sitting under an apple tree and through the 
falling of an apple discovering the circulation of the 
blood, is to us a splendid figure of genius; but I 
have no doubt the neighbors said at the time that 
he would have been much better employed helping 
Mrs. W. with the housework. And probably there 
was a lot of loose and scornful talk when Benjamin 
Franklin went out in a thimder storm with a kite 
and a brass key and fussed round among the dart- 
ing lightning bolts until he was as wet as a rag and 
then came home and tried to dry his sopping feet 
before one of those old-fashioned open fireplaces so 
common in that period. But what was the result? 
(150] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

The Franklin heater — that's what. With such his- 
toric examples behind us, what cared we though the 
tongue of slander wagged while we inhabited our 
site with the leaky heavens for a roof to our parlor 
and the far horizons for its wall. Not to every one 
is vouchsafed the double boon of spending long 
happy days in one's home and at the same time 
keeping out in the open air. 

On the day the United Press scooped the opposi- 
tion by announcing the cessation of hostilities some 
days before the hostilities really cessated, thereby 
scoring one of the greatest journalistic beats since 
the Millerites prognosticated the end of the world, 
giving day, date and hour somewhat prematurely 
in advance of that interesting event, which as a mat- 
ter of fact has not taken place yet — on that memor- 
able day the country at large celebrated the advent 
of peace. We also celebrated the peace, but on a 
personal account we celebrated something else be- 
;sides. We celebrated the prospect of an early re- 
sumption of work in the construction of our house. 

During the months that followed I learned a lot 
about the intricacies and the mysteries of house 
building. Beforehand, in my ignorance I figured 
that the preliminary plans might be stretched out or 

[151] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

contracted in to suit the shifting mood of the de- 
signer and the sudden whim of his client, but that 
once the walls went up and the beams went across 
and the rafters came down both parties were there- 
after bound by set metes and bounds. Not at all. 
I discovered that there is nothing more plastic than 
brickwork, nothing more elastic than a girder. A 
carpenter spends days of his time and dollars of 
your money fitting and joining a certain section of 
framework ; that is to say, he engages in such 
craftsmanship when not sharpening his saw. It has 
been my observation that the average conscientious 
carpenter allows forty per cent of his eight-hour 
day to saw sharpening. It must be a joy to him 
to be able to give so much time daily to putting nice 
keen teeth in a saw, knowing that somebody else is 
paying him for it at the rate of ninety cents an hour. 
Watching him at work in intervals between saw fil- 
ing, you get from him the impression that unless 
this particular angle of the wooden skeleton is ar- 
ticulated just so the whole structure will come tum- 
bling down some day when least expected. At 
length he gets the job done to his satisfaction and 
goes elsewhere. 

Along comes a steamfitter and he, whistling mer- 
[152] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

rily the while, takes a chisel or an adze or an ax 
and just bodaciously haggles a large ragged orifice 
in the carpenter's masterpiece. Through the hole 
he runs a Queen Rosamond's maze of iron pipes. 
He then departs and the carpenter is called back to 
the scene of the mutilation. After sharpening his 
saw some more in a restrained and contemplative 
manner, he patches up the wound as best he can. 
Enter, then, the boss plumber accompanied by a 
helper. The boss plumber finds a comfortable two- 
by-four to sit on and does sit thereon and lights up 
his pipe and while he smokes and directs operations 
the assistant or understudy, with edged tools pro- 
vided for that purpose, tears away some of the 
cadaver's most important ribs and several joints of 
its spinal column for the forthcoming insertion of 
various concealed fixtures. 

Following the departure of these assassins the 
patient carpenter returns and to the best of his 
ability reduces all the compound fractures that he 
conveniently can get at, following which he sharp- 
ens his saw — not the big saw which he sharpened 
from eight-forty-five to ten-fifteen o'clock this 
morning, but the little buttonhole saw which he has 
not sharpened since yesterday afternoon ; this done, 

[153] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

Ee calls it a Jay and goes home to teach his little 
son Elmer, who expects to follow in the paternal 
footsteps, the rudiments of the art of filing a saw 
without being in too much of a hurry about it, 
which after all is the main point in this department 
of the carpentering profession. 

And the next day the plumber remembers where 
he left his sack of smoking tobacco, or the steam 
fitter's attention is directed to the fact that when he 
stuck in the big pipe like a bass tuba he forgot to 
insert alongside it the little pipe like a piccolo, and 
therefore it becomes necessary to maltreat the al- 
ready thrice-mangled remains of woodwork. A 
month or so later the plasterers arrive — ^they were 
due in a week, but a plasterer who showed up when 
he was expected or any time within a month after 
he had solemnly promised on his sacred word of 
honor that he meant to show up would have his 
card taken away from him and be put out of the 
union. Hours after Gabriel has blown his trump 
for the last call it is going to be incumbent upon 
the little angel bell hops to go and page the plaster- 
ers, else they won't get there for judgment at all. 

Be that as it may and undoubtedly will be, in a 
month or so the plasterers arrive, wearing in streaks 
[154] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

the same effects in laid-on complexion that so many 
of our leading debutantes are wearing all over their 
faces. The chief plasterer looks over the prospect 
and decides that in order to insure a smooth and un- 
broken surface for his plaster coat the plumbing 
and the healing connections must have their elbows 
tucked in a few notches, which ultimatum naturally 
requires the good offices of the carpenter, first to 
snatch out and afterward to hammer back into some 
sort of alignment the shreds and fragments of his 
original job. When this sort of thing, with varia- 
tions, has gone on through a period of months, a 
house has become an intricate and complicated fab- 
ric of patchworks and mosaics held together, as 
nearly as a layman can figure, by the powder of co- 
hesion and the pressures of dead weights. The 
amazing part of it is that it stays put. I am quite 
sure that our house will stay put, because despite 
the vagaries — perhaps I should say the morbid curi- 
osity — of various artificers intent on taking the 
poor thing apart every little while, it was con- 
structed of materials which as humans compute mu- 
tabilities are reasonably permanent in their basic 
characters. 

It was our desire to have a new house that would 

[155] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

look like an old house ; a yearning in which the archi- 
tect heartily concurred, he having a distaste for the 
slick, shiny, look-out-for-the-paint look which is 
common enough in American country houses. In 
this ambition a combination of circumstances served 
our ends. iFor the lower walls we looted two of 
the ancient stone fences which meandered aimlessly 
across the face of our acres. According to local 
tradition, those fences dated back to pre-Revolu- 
tionary days ; they were bearded thick with lichens 
and their faces were scored and seamed. In laying 
them up we were fortunate enough to find and hire 
a stonemason who was part artificer but mostly real 
artist — an Italian, with the good taste in masonry 
which seems to be inherent in his countrymen; only 
in this case the good taste was developed to a very 
high degree. Literally he would fondle a stone 
whose color and contour appealed to him and his 
final dab with the trowel of mortar was in the na- 
ture of a caress. 

On top of this find came another and even luckier 
one. Three miles away was an abandoned brick- 
yard. Once an extensive busy plant, it had lain 
idle for many years. Lately it had been sold and 
the new owners were now preparing to salvage the 
[156] 



TWO MORE YEARS ELAPSE 

material it contained. Thanks to the forethought 
of the architect, we secured the pick of these pick- 
ings. From old pits we exhumed fine hard brick 
which had been stacked there for a generation, tak- 
ing on those colors and that texture which only 
long exposure to wind and rain and sun can give to 
brick. These went into our upper walls. For a 
lower price than knotty, wavy, fresh-cut, half-green 
spruce would have cost us at a lumber yard, modern 
prices and lumber yards being what they are, we 
stripped from the old kiln sheds beautiful clear 
North Carolina boards, seasoned and staunch. 
These were for the rough flooring and the sheath- 
ing. The same treasure mine provided us with iron 
bars for reenforcing; with heavy beams and splen- 
did thick wide rafters; with fire brick glazed over 
by clays and minerals which in a molten state had 
flowed down their surfaces ; with girders and under- 
pinnings of better grade and greater weight than 
any housebuilder of moderate means can afford 
these times. Finally, for roofing we procured old 
field slates of all colors and thicknesses and all sizes ; 
and these by intent were laid on in irregular catch- 
as-catch-can fashion, suggestive when viewed at a 
little distance of the effect of thatching. Another 

[157] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

Italian, a wood carver this time, craftily cut the 
scrolled beam ends which show beneath our friendly 
eaves and in the shadows of our gables. It was 
necessary only to darken with stains the newly 
gouged surfaces; the rest had been antiquated al- 
ready by fifty years of Hudson River climate. Be- 
fore the second beam was in place a wren was build- 
ing her nest on the sloped top of the first one. We 
used to envy that wren — she had moved in before 
we had. 



[158] 



CHAPTER VII: *'AND SOLD TO 



5> 



CHAPTER VII 



"and sold to 



When the house was up as far as the second 
floor and the first mortgage, talk rose touching on 
the furnishings. To me it seemed there would be 
ample time a decade or so thence to begin thinking 
of the furnishings. So far as I could tell there was 
no hurry and probably there never would be any 
hurry. For the job had reached that stage so dis- 
mally familiar to any one who ever started a house 
with intent to live in it when completed, if ever. 
I refer to the stage when a large and variegated 
assortment of hired help are ostensibly busy upon 
the premises and yet everything seems practically 
to be at a standstill. From the standpoint of a 
mere bystander whose only function is to pay the 
bills, it seems that the workmen are only coming to 
the job of a morning because they hate the idea of 
hanging round their own homes all day with noth- 
ing to do. 

So it was with us. Sawing and hammering and 

[161] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

steam fitting and plumbing and stone-lying and 
brick-lying were presumed to be going on ; laborers 
were wielding the languid pick; a roof layer was 
defying the laws of gravitation on our ridgepole; 
at stated intervals there were great gobs of pay- 
ments on account of this or that to be met and still 
and yet and notwithstanding, to the lay eye the 
progress appeared infinitesimal. For the first time 
I could understand why Pharaoh or Rameses or 
whoever it was that built the Pyramids displayed 
peevishness toward the Children of Israel. Indeed 
I developed a cordial sympathy for him. He had 
my best wishes. They were four or five thousand 
years late, but even so he had 'em and welcome. 

Accordingly when the matter of investing in fur- 
nishings was broached I stoutly demurred. As I 
recall, I spoke substantially as follows: 

"Why all this mad haste? Rome w^asn't built in 
a day, as I have often heard, and in view of my 
own recent experiences I am ready to make affi- 
davit to the fact. I'll go further than that. I'll 
bet any sum within reason, up to a million dollars, 
that the meanest smokehouse in Rome was not 
built in a day. No Roman smokehouse — Ionic, 
Doric, Corinthian or Old Line Etruscan — is barred. 
[162] 



"AND SOLD TO 



Unless workingmen have changed a whole lot since 
those times, it was not possible to begin to start to 
commence to get ready to go ahead to proceed to 
advance with that smokehouse or any other smoke- 
house in a day. And after they did get started they 
dallied along and dallied along and killed time until 
process curing came into fashion among the best 
families of Ancient Rome and smokehouses lost 
their vogue altogether. Let us not be too impetu- 
ous about the detail of furnishings. I have a feel- 
ing — a feeling based on my own observations over 
yonder at the site of our own little undertaking — 
that when that house is really done the only fur- 
nishings we'll require will be a couple of wheel 
chairs and something to warm up spoon victuals in. 
"Anyhow, what's wrong with the furnishings we 
already have in storage? Judging by the present 
rate of non-progress — of static advancement, if I 
may use such a phrase — long before we have a place 
to set them up in our furnishings will be so entirely 
out of style that they'll be back in style all over 
again, if you get me. These things move in cycles, 
you know. One generation buys furniture and uses 
it. The next generation finding it hopelessly old- 
fashioned and out of date burns it up or casts it 

[163] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

away or gives it away or stores it in the attic — any- 
thing to get rid of it. The third generation spends 
vast sums of money trying to restore it or the likes 
of it, for by that time the stuff which was despised 
and discarded is in strong demand and fetching 
fancy prices. 

"The only mistake is to belong to the middle gen- 
eration, which curiously enough is always the pres- 
ent one. We crave what our grandparents owned 
but our parents did not. Our grandchildren will 
crave what we had but our own children won't. 
They'll junk it. To-day's monstrosity is day-after- 
tomorrow's art treasure just as today's museum 
piece is day-bef ore-yesterday's monstrosity. There- 
fore, I repeat, let us remain calm. I figure that 
when we actually get into that house our grand- 
children will be of a proper age to appreciate the 
belongings now appertaining to us, and all will 
be well." 

Thus in substance I spoke. The counter argu- 
ment offered was that — conceding what I said to 
be true — the fact remained and was not to be gain- 
said that we did not have anywhere near enough of 
furnishings to equip the house we hoped at some 
distant date to occupy. 
[164] 



"AND SOLD TO 



"You must remember," I was told, "that for the 
six or eight years before we decided to move out 
here to the country we lived in a fiat." 

"What of it?" I retorted instantly. "What of 
it?" I repeated, for when in the heat of controversy 
I think up an apt bit of repartee like that I am apt 
to utter it a second time for the sake of emphasis. 
Pausing only to see if my stroke of instantaneous 
retort had struck in, I continued : 

"That last flat we had swallowed up furniture 
as a rat hole swallows sand. First and last we must 
have poured enough stuff into that flat to furnish 
the state of Rhode Island. And what about the 
monthly statements we are getting now from the 
storage warehouse signed by the president of the 
company, old man PL Remit? Doesn't the size of 
them prove that in the furniture-owning line at 
least we are to be regarded as persons of consider- 
able consequence?" 

"Don't be absurd," I was admonished. "Just 
compare the size of the largest bedroom in that last 
flat we had in One Hundred and Tenth Street with 
the size of the smallest bedroom we expect to have 
in the new place. Why, you could put the biggest 
bedroom we had there into the smallest bedroom 

[165] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

we are going to have here and lose it! And then 
think of the halls we must furnish and the living 
room and the breakfast porch and everything. Did 
we have a breakfast porch in the flat? We did not! 
Did we have a living room forty feet one way and 
twenty-eight the other ? We did not ! Did we have 
a dining room in that flat that was big enough to 
swing a cat in?" 

"We didn't have any cat." 

"All the same, we " 

"I doubt whether any of the neighbors would 
have loaned us a cat just for that purpose." I felt 
I had the upper hand and I meant to keep it. 
"Besides, you know I don't like cats. What is the 
use of importing foreign matters such as cats — and 
purely problematical cats at that — into a discussion 
about something else? What relation does a cat 
bear to furniture, I ask you? Still, speaking of 
cats, I'm reminded " 

"Never mind trying to be funny. And never 
mind trying to steer the conversation off the right 
track either. Please pay attention to what I am 
saying — let's see, where was I? Oh, yes: Did we 
have a hall in that flat worthy to be dignified by 
the name of a hall? We did not! We had a pas- 
[166] 



AND SOLD TO 



sagewaj^ — that's what it was — a passageway. Now 
there is a difference between furnishing a mere 
passageway and a regular hall, as you are about to 
discover before you are mai y months older." 

On second thought I had to concede there was 
something in what had just been said. One could 
not have swung one's cat in our dining room in the 
flat with any expectation of doing the cat any real 
good. And the hallway we had in our flat was like 
nearly all halls in New York flats. It was com- 
fortably filled when you hung a water-color picture 
up on its wall and uncomfortably crowded if you 
put a clarionet in the corner. It would have been 
bad luck to open an umbrella anywhere in our flat 
— bad luck for the umbrella if for nothing else. 
Despite its enormous capacity for inhaling furni- 
ture it had been, when you came right down to 
cases, a form-fitting flat. So mentally confessing 
myself worsted at this angle of the controversy, I 
fell back on my original argument that certainly it 
would be years and years and it might be forever 
before we possibly could expect — at the current 
rate of speed of the building operations, or speak- 
ing exactly, at the current rate of the lack of speed 
— to move in. 

[167] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

"But the architect has promised us on his solemn 
word of honor " 

"Don't tell me what the architect has promised 1*' 
I said bitterly. "Next to waiters, architects are the 
most optimistic creatures on earth. A waiter is al- 
ways morally certain that twenty minutes is the 
extreme limit of time that will be required to cook 
anything. You think that you would like, say, to 
have a fish that is not listed on the bill of fare under 
the subheading 'Ready Dishes' — it may be a whale 
or it may be a minnow : that detail makes no differ- 
ence to him — and you ask the waiter how about it, 
and he is absolutely certain that it will be possible 
to borrow a fishing pole somewhere and dig bait 
and send out and catch that fish and bring it back 
in and clean it and take the scales and the fins off 
and garnish it with sprigs of parsley and potatoes 
and lemon and make some drawn butter sauce to 
pour over it and bring it to you in twenty minutes. 
If he didn't think so he would not be a waiter. An 
architect is exactly like a waiter, except that he 
thinks in terms of days instead of terms of min- 
utes. Don't tell me about architects ! I only wish 
I were as sure of heaven as the average architect is 
regarding that which no mortal possibly can be sure 
[168] 



**AND SOLD TO 



of, labor conditions being what chronically they 



are." 



But conceded that the reader is but a humble 
husbandman — meaning by that a man who is mar- 
ried — he doubtless has already figured out the re- 
sult of this debate. Himself, he knows how such 
debates usually do terminate. In the end I sur- 
rendered, and the final upshot was that we set about 
the task of furnishing the rooms that were to be. 
From that hour dated the beginning of my wider 
and fuller education into the system commonly in 
vogue these times in or near the larger cities along 
our Atlantic seaboard for the furnishing of homes. 
I have learned though. It has cost me a good deal 
of time and some money and my nervous system is 
not what it was, having suffered a series of abrupt 
shocks, but I have learned. I know something now 
— ^not much, but a little — about period furniture. 

A period, as you may recall, is equal to a full 
stop ; in fact a period is a full stop. This is a rule 
in punctuation which applies in other departments 
of life, as I have discovered. Go in extensively for 
the period stuff in your interior equipments and 
presently you will be coming to a full stop in your 
funds on hand. The thing works out the same way 

[169] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

every time. I care not how voluminously large and 
plethoric your cash balance may be, period furni- 
ture carried to an excess will convert it into a recent 
site and then the bank will be sending you one of 
those little printed notices politely intimating that 
"your account appears overdrawn." And any time 
a banker goes so far as to hint that your account 
appears overdrawn you may bet the last cent you 
haven't left that he is correct. He knows darned 
good and well it is overdrawn and this merely is 
his kindly way of softening the blow to you. 

I have a theory that when checks begin to roll in 
from the clearing house made out to this or that 
dealer in period furniture the paying teller hastens 
to the adjusting department to see how your de- 
posits seem to be bearing up under the strain. It 
is as though he heard you were buying oil stocks or 
playing the races out of your savings and he might 
as well begin figuring now about how long approxi- 
mately it will be before your account will become 
absolutely vacant in appearance. 

As I was remarking, I know a trifle about period 

furniture. Offhand now, I can distinguish a piece 

which dates back to Battle Abbey from something 

which goes back no farther than Battle Creek. Be- 

[170] 



'AND SOLD TO — ' 

fore I could not do this. I was forever getting 
stuff of the time of the Grand Monarch confused 
with something right fresh out of Grand Rapids. 
Generally speaking, all antiques — whether handed 
down from antiquity or made on the premises — 
looked alike to me. But in the light of my pain- 
fully acquired knowledge I now can see the differ- 
ence almost at a glance. Sometimes I may waver a 
trifle. I look at a piece of furniture which purports 
to be an authentic antique. It is decrepit and 
creaky and infirm; the upholstering is frayed and 
faded and stained ; the legs are splayed and tottery ; 
the seams gape and there are cracks in the panel- 
ing. If it is a chair, no plump person in his or her 
right mind would dare sit down in it. If it is a bed- 
stead, any sizable adult undertaking to sleep in it 
would do so at his peril. So, outwardly and visibly 
it seems to bear the stamp of authenticity. Yet still 
I doubt. It may be a craftily devised counterfeit. 
It may be something of comparatively recent manu- 
facture which has undergone careless handling. In 
such a case I seek for the wormholes — if any — ^the 
same as any other seasoned collector would. 

Up until comparatively recently wormholes, con- 
sidered as such, had no great lure to me. If I 

[171] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

thought of them at all I thought of them as a topic 
which was rather lacking in interest to begin with 
and one easily exhausted. If you had asked me 
about wormholes I — speaking offhand — probably 
would say that this was a matter which naturally 
might appeal to a worm but would probably hold 
forth no great attraction for a human being, imless 
he happened to be thinking of going fishing. But 
this was in my more ignorant, cruder days, before 
I took a beginner's easy course in the general 
science of wormholes. I am proud of my progress, 
but I would not go so far just yet as to say that I 
am a professional. Still I am out of the amateur 
class. I suppose you might call me a semi-pro, able 
under ordinary circumstances to do any given 
wormhole in par. 

For example, at present I have an average of 
three correct guesses out of five chances — which is 
a very high average for one who but a little while 
ago was the veriest novice at distinguishing between 
ancient wormholes, as made by a worm, and modern 
wormholing done by piece-work. I cannot explain 
to you just how I do this — it is a thing which after 
a while just seems to come to you. But of course 
you must have a natural gift for it to start with — 
[172] 



"AND SOLD TO 



>» 



an inherent affinity for wormholes, as it were. 

However, I will say that I did not thoroughly 
master the cardinal principles of this art until after 
I had studied under one of the leading wormhole 
experts in this country — a man who has devoted 
years of his life just to wormholes. True, like most 
great specialists he is a person of one idea. Get 
him off of wormholes and the conversation is apt to 
drag, but discussing his own topic he can go on for 
hours and hours. I really believe he gets more 
pleasure out of one first-class, sixteenth-century 
wormhole than the original worm did. And as 
Kipling would say: I learned about wormholes 
from him. 

At the outset I must confess I rather leaned 
toward a nice, neat, up-to-date wormhole as pro- 
duced amid sanitary surroundings in an inspected 
factory out in Michigan, where no scab wormholes 
would be tolerated, rather than toward one which 
had been done by an unorganized foreign worm — 
possibly even a pauperized worm — two or three 
hundred years ago, when there was no such thing as 
a closed shop and no protection against germs.^ 
Whenever possible I believe in patronizing the 
products of union labor. But the expert speedily 

[173] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

set me right on this point. He made me see that 
in furnishings and decorations nothing modern can 
possibly compare with something which is crumbly 
and tottery with the accumulated weight of the 
hoary years. 

He taught me about patina, too. Patina is a 
most fascinating subject, once you get thoroughly 
into it. Everybody who goes in for period furni- 
ture must get into it sooner or later, and the sooner 
the better, because if you are not able to recognize 
patina at a glance you are as good as lost when you 
undertake to appraise antique furniture. When a 
connoisseur lays hold upon a piece of furniture al- 
leged to have rightful claims to antiquity the first 
thing he does is to run his hand along the exposed 
surfaces to ascertain by the practiced touch of his 
fingers whether the patina is on the level or was 
applied by a crafty counterfeiter. After that he 
upends it to look for the wormholes. If both are 
orthodox he gives it his validation as the genuine 
article. If they are not he brands the article a 
spurious imitation and rejects it with ill-concealed 
scorn. There are other tests, but these two are the 
surest ones. 

For the benefit of those who may not have had 
[174] 



"AND SOLD TO 



any advantages as recently and expensively en- 
joyed I will state that patina is the gloss or film 
which certain sorts of metal and certain sorts of 
polished woods acquire through age, long usage and 
wear. With the passage of time fabrics also may 
acquire it. You may have noticed it in connection 
with a pair of black diagonal trousers that had seen 
long and severe wear or on the elbows of summer- 
before-last's blue serge coat. However, patina in 
pants or on the braided seams of a presiding elder's 
Sunday suit is not so highly valued as when it oc- 
curs in relation to a Jacobean church pew or a 
William-and-Mary what-not. 

When I look back on my untutored state before 
we began to patronize the antique shops and the 
auction shops I am ashamed — honestly I am. The 
only excuse I can offer is based on the grounds of 
my earlier training. Like so many of my fellow 
countrjonen, born and reared as I was in the crude 
raw atmosphere of interior America — anyhow, al- 
most any wealthy New Yorker will tell you it is a 
crude raw atmosphere and not in any way to be 
compared with the refined atmosphere which is 
about the only thing you can get for nothing in 
Europe — as I say, brought up as I was amid such 

[175] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

raw surroundings and from the cradle made the 
unconscious victim of this environment, I had an 
idea that when a person craved furniture he went 
for it to a regular furniture store having ice boxes 
and porch hammocks and unparalleled bargains in 
golden oak dining-room sets in the show windows, 
and there he made his selection and gave his order 
and paid a deposit down and the people at the shop 
sent it up to his house in a truck with historic scenes 
such as Washington Crossing the Delaware and 
Daniel in the Lions' Den painted on the sides of 
the truck, and after that he had nothing to worry 
about in connection with the transaction except the 
monthly installments. 

You see, I date back to the Rutherford B. Hayes 
period of American architecture and applied de- 
signing — *a period which had a solid background of 
mid- Victorian influence with a trace of Philadel- 
phia Centennial running through it, being bounded 
at the farther end by such sterling examples of par- 
lor statuary as the popular pieces respectively en- 
titled, "Welcoming the New Minister," "Bringing 
Home the Bride," and "Baby's First Bath," and 
bounded at the nearer end by burnt-wood plaques 
and frames for family portraits with plush insets 
[176] 



"AND SOLD TO " 

and hand-painted flowers on the moldings. By the 
conceptions of those primitive times nothing so set 
off the Hkeness of a departed great-aunt as a few 
red-plush insets. 

Some of my most cherished boyhood memories 
centered about bird's-eye-maple bedroom sets and 
parlor furniture of heavy black walnut trimmed in 
a manner which subsequently came to be popular 
among undertakers for the adornment of the casket 
when they had orders to spare no expense for a 
really fashionable or — as the saying went then — a 
tony funeral. Tony subsequently became nobby 
and nobby is now swagger, but though the idioms 
change with the years the meaning remains the 
same. When the parlor was opened for a formal 
occasion — it remained closed while the ordinary life 
of the household went on — its interior gave off a 
rich deep turpentiny smell like a paint-and- varnish 
store on a hot day. And the bird's-eye maple, as 
I recall, had a high slick finish which, however, did 
not dim the staring, unwinking effect of the round 
knots which so plentifully dappled its graining. 
Lying on the bed and contemplating the footboard 
gave one the feeling that countless eyes were look- 

[177] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

ing at one, which in those days was regarded as 
highly desirable. 

I remember all our best people favored bird's-eye 
maple for the company room. They clung to it, 
too. East Aurora had a hard struggle before it 
made any noticeable impress upon the decorative 
tendencies of West Kentucky, for we were a con- 
servative breed and slow to take up the mission 
styles featuring armchairs weighing a couple of 
hundred pounds apiece and art-craft designs in 
hammered metals and semi-tanned leathers. More- 
over, a second-hand shop in our town was not an 
antique shop; it was what its name implied — a 
second-hand shop. You didn't go there to buy 
things you wanted, but to sell things you did not 
want. 

So in view of these youthful influences it should 
be patent to all that, having other things to think 
of — such, for example, as making a living — I did 
not realize that in New York at least those wish- 
ful of following the modes did not go to a good live 
shop making a specialty of easy payments when 
they had a house-furnishing proposition on their 
hands. That might be all very well for the pedes- 
trian classes and for those living in the remote dis- 
[178] 



'AND SOLD TO 



J) 



tricts who kept a mail-order catalogue on the center 
table and wrote on from time to time with the 
money order enclosed. 

I soon was made to understand that the really 
correct thing was first of all to call in a professional 
decorator, if one could afford it. A professional 
decorator is a person of either sex who can think up 
more ways and quicker ways of spending other peo- 
ple's money than the director of a shipping board 
can. But whether you retained the services of a 
regular decorator or elected to struggle along on 
your own, you went for your purchases to specialty 
shops or to antique shops, or — best of all — ^to the 
smart auction shops on or hard by Fifth Avenue 
and Madison Avenue. 

Than the auction rooms in the Fifth Avenue dis- 
trict I know of no places better adapted for study- 
ing patina, wormholing and human nature in a va- 
riety of interesting phases. To such an establish- 
ment, on the days when a sale is announced — which 
means two or three times a week for a good part of 
the year — repair wealthy patrons, patrons who 
were wealthy before the mania for bidding in things 
came upon them, as it does come upon so many, 
and patrons who are trying to look as though they 

[179] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

were wealthy. The third group are in the majority. 

Amateur collectors come, on the lookout for lace 
fans or Japanese bronzes or Chinese ceramics or 
furniture or pictures or hangings or rugs or tapes- 
tries, or whatever it is that constitutes their favorite 
hobby. There are sure to be prominent actor folk 
and author folk in this category. Dealers are on 
hand, each as wise looking as a barnf ul of hoot-owls 
and talking the jargon of the craft. 

Agents from rival auction houses are sometimes 
seen, ready, should the opportunity present itself, 
to snap up a bargain with intent to reauction it at 
their own houses at a profit. With the resident 
proprietor one of this gentry is about as popular as 
a bat in a boarding school, but since there is no law 
to bar him out and since it is in the line of business 
for him to be present, why present he generally is. 

Rich women drive up in their town cars and 
shabby purveyors of antique wares from little 
clutter-hole shops on cross streets at the fringe of 
the East Side shamble in on their flat arches. Then, 
too, there are the habitues of the auction room 
habit; women mostly, but some men too, unfortu- 
nate creatures who have fallen victim to an incur- 
able vice and to whom the announcement in the 
[180] 



"AND SOLD TO 



)> 



papers of an unusual sale is lure sufBeient to draw 
them hither whether or not they hope to buy any- 
thing; and finally there are representatives of a 
common class in any big city — individuals who go 
wherever free entertainment is provided and espe- 
cially to spots where they are likely to see assem- 
bled notables of the stage or society or of high 
financial circles. 

The auctioneer almost invariably is of a com- 
pounded and composite type that might be de- 
scribed as part matinee idol, part professional re- 
vivalist, part floor walker, part court jester and 
part jury pleader, with just a trace of a suggestion 
of the official manner of the well-to-do undertaker 
stirred into the mixture. By sight at least he 
knows all of his regular customers and is inclined 
with a special touch of respectful affection toward 
such of them as prefer on these occasions to be 
known by an initial rather than by name. 

"And sold to Mr. B.," he says with a gracious 
smile. Or — "Now then, Mrs. H., doesn't this bea- 
u-tiful varse mean anything to you?" he inquires 
deferentially when the bidding lags. "Did I hear 
you offer seven hundred and fifty, Colonel J.?" he 
asks in a tone of deep solicitude. 

[181] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

By long acquaintance with his regular clientele, 
or perhaps by a sort of intuition which is not the 
least of his gifts, he is able to interpret into sums of 
currency a nod, a wink, a raised finger, a shrug or 
the lift of an eyebrow, at a distance of anywhere 
from ten to sixty feet. 

In the face of disappointments manifolded a 
thousand times a month this man yet remains an 
unfailing optimist. Watching him in action one 
gets the impression that he reads none but glad 
books, goes to none save glad plays and when the 
weather is inclement shares the viewpoint of that 
sweet singer of the Sunny South who wrote to the 
effect that it is not raining rain to-day, it's raining 
daffodils, and then two lines further along corrects 
his botany to state that having been convinced of 
his error of a moment before he now wishes to take 
advantage of this opportunity to inform the public 
that it is not raining rain to-day, but on the con- 
trary is raining roses down, or metrical words to 
that general tenor. He was a good poet, as poets 
go, but not the sort of person you would care to 
loan your best umbrella to. 

In another noticeable regard our auctioneer 
friend betrays somewhat the same abrupt shiftings 
[182] 



"AND SOLD TO 



»5 



of temperamental manifestations that are reputed 
to have been shown by Ben Bolt's lady friend. I 
am speaking of the late lamented Sweet Alice, who 
— as will be recalled — would weep with delight 
when you gave her a smile, but trembled with fear 
at your frown. Apparently Alice couldn't help 
behaving in this curious way — one gathers that she 
must have been the village idiot, harmless enough 
but undoubtedly an annoying sort of person to have 
hanging round, weeping copiously whenever any- 
body else was cheerful, and perhaps immediately 
afterward trembling in a disconcerting sort of way. 
She must have spoiled many a pleasant party in 
her day, so probably it was just as well that the 
community saw fit to file her away in the old church- 
yard in the obscure corner mentioned more or less 
rhythmically in the disclosures recorded as having 
been made to Mr. Bolt upon the occasion of his 
return to his native shire after what presumably 
had been a considerable absence. 

The poet chronicler, Mr. English, is a trifle vague 
on this point, but considering everything it is but 
fair to infer that Alice's funeral was practically by 
acclamation. Beyond question it must have been a 
relief to all concerned, including the family of de- 

[183] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

ceased, to feel that a person so grievously afflicted 
mentally was at last permanently planted under a 
certain slab of stone rather loosely described in the 
conversation just referred to as granite so gray. 
One wishes Mr. English had been a trifle more 
exact in furnishing the particular details of this sad 
case. Still, I suppose it is hard for a poet to be 
technical and poetical at the same time. And 
though he failed to go into particulars I am quite 
sure that when asked if he didn't remember Alice, 
Mr. Bolt answered in the decided affirmative. It 
is a cinch he couldn't have forgotten her, the official 
half-wit and lightning-change artist of the county. 
But whereas this unfortunate young woman's 
conduct may only be accounted for on the grounds 
of a total irresponsibility, there is method behind 
the same sharply contrasted shift of mood as dis- 
played by the chief salesman of the auction room. 
He is thrilled — visibly and physically thrilled — at 
each rapidly recurring opportunity of presenting 
an article for disposal to the highest bidder ; hardly 
can he control his emotions of joy at the prospect 
of offering this particular object to an audience of 
discriminating tastes and balanced judgment. But 
mark the change : How instantly, how completely 
[184] 



"AND SOLD TO 



does a devastating and poignant distress overcome 
him when his hearers perversely dechne to enter 
into spirited competition for a thing so priceless 1 
A sob rises in his throat, choking his utterance to 
a degree where it becomes impossible for him to 
speak more than three or four hundred words per 
minute ; grief dims his eye ; regret — not on his own 
account but for others — droops his shoulders. 
When it comes to showing distress he makes that 
poor feeble-minded Alice girl look like a beginner. 
Yet repeated shocks of this character fail to daunt 
the sunniness of his true nature. The harder his 
spirits are dashed down to earth the greater the 
resiliency and the buoyancy with which they bounce 
up again. The man has a soul of new rubber! 

Let us draw near and scrutinize the scene that 
unfolds itself at each presentation : The attendants 
fetch out an offering described in the printed cata- 
logue, let us say, as Number 77 A : Oriental Lamp 
with Silk Shade. Reverently they place it upon a 
velvet-covered stand in a space at the back end of 
the salesroom, where a platform is inclosed in dra- 
peries with lights so disposed overhead and in the 
wings as to shed a soft radiance upon the inclosed 
area. The helpers fade out of the picture respect* 

[185] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

fully. A tiny pause ensues ; this stage wait has been 
skillfully timed; a suitable atmosphere subtly has 
been created. Oh, believe me, in New York we do 
these things with a proper regard for the dramatic 
values — culture governs all! 

The withdrawal of the attendants is the cue for 
our sunny friend, perched up as he is behind his 
little pulpit with his little gavel in his hand, to fall 
gracefully into a posture bespeaking in every curve 
of it a worshipful, almost an idolatrous admiration. 

"And now, ladies and gentlemen" — hear him 
say it — "I have the pleasure and the privilege of 
submitting for your approval one of the absolute 
gems of this splendid collection. A magnificent 
example of the Ming period — mind you, a genuine 
Ming. I am confidentially informed by the execu- 
tors of the estate of the late Mr. Gezinks, the for- 
mer owner of these wonderful belongings, that it 
was the prize piece of his entire collection. Look 
at the color — just look at the shape ! Worth a thou- 
sand dollars if it is worth a cent. Try to buy it in 
one of the antique shops round the corner for that 
— just try, that's all I ask you to do. Now then" — 
this with a cheery, inviting, confident smile — "now 
[186] 



"AND SOLD TO 



then, what am I offered? Who'll start it off at five 
hundred?" 

There is no answer. A look of surprise not un- 
mixed with chagrin crosses his mobile countenance. 
From his play of expression you feel that what he 
feels, underlying his other feelings, is a sympathy 
for people so blinded to their own good luck as not 
to leap headlong and en masse at this unparalleled 
chance. 

"Tut tut!" he exclaims and again, "tut tut! Very 
well, then," — his tone is resigned — "do I hear four 
hundred and seventy-five — four hundred and fifty? 
Who'll start it at four twenty-five?" 

His gaze sweeps the faces of the assemblage. It 
is a compelling gaze, indeed you might say mes- 
meristic. There is a touch of pathos in it, though, 
an unuttered appeal to the gathering to consider its 
own several interests. 

"Do I hear four hundred?" He speaks of four 
hundred as an ostrich might speak of a tomtit's egg 
— as something comparatively insignificant and 
puny. 

"Twenty dollars!" pipes a voice. 

He clasps his hand to his brow. This is too much; 
it is much too much. But business is business. He 

[187] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

rallies; he smiles bitterly, wanly. His soul within 
him is crushed and bruised, but he rallies. Rallying 
is one of the best things he does and one of the most 
frequent. The bidding livens, slackens, lags, then 
finally ceases. With a gesture betokening utter 
despair, with lineaments bathed in the very waters 
of woe, he heart-brokenly knocks the vase down to 
somebody for $38.50. 

But by the time the hired men have fetched forth 
Lot 78 he miraculously has recovered his former 
confidence and for the fortv-oddth time since two 
o'clock — it is now nearly three forty-five — is his 
old cheerful beaming self. Thirty seconds later his 
heart has been broken in a fresh place ; yet we may 
be sure that to-morrow morning when he rises he 
will be whistling a merry roundelay, his faith in 
the innate goodness of human nature all made new 
and fully restored to him. He would make a per- 
fectly bully selection if you were sending a mes- 
senger to a home to break to an unsuspecting house- 
hold some such tragic tidings, sayt as that the head 
of the family, while rounding a turn on high, had 
skidded and was now being removed from the front 
elevation of an adjacent brick wall with a putty 
knife. If example counted for anything at all, he 
[188] 



"AND SOLD TO 



» 



would have the mourners all cheered up again and 
the females among them discussing the most becom- 
ing modes in black crepe in less than no time at all. 

My, mj^ but how my sense of understanding did 
broaden under the influence of the auction sales we 
attended through the spring and on into the sum- 
mer. When the morning paper came we would 
turn to the advertising section and look for auction 
announcements. If there was to be one, and gen- 
erally there was — one or more — we canceled all 
other plans and attended. Going to auctions be- 
came our regular employment, our pastime, our 
entertainment. It became our obsession. It al- 
most became our joint calling in life. To our be- 
setting mania we sacrificed all else. 

I remember there was one afternoon when John 
McCormack was billed to sing. I am very fond of 
hearing John McCormack. For one thing, he gen- 
erally sings in a language which I can understand, 
and for another, I like his way of singing. He 
sings very much as I would sing if I had decided 
to take up singing for a living instead of writing. 
This is only one of the sacrifices I have made for 
the sake of English literature. 

McCormack that day had to strusrgle through 

[189] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

without me. Because there was a sale of Italian an- 
tiques billed for three p. m., and we were going to 
have an Italian hall and an Italian living room in 
the new house, and we felt it to be our bounden 
duty to attend. 

It took some time and considerable work on the 
part of those fitted to guide me in the matter of 
decorations before I fell entirely into the idea of 
an Italian room, this possibly being due to the fact 
that I was born so far away from Italy and passed 
through childhood with so few Italian influences 
coming into my life. Even now I balk at the idea 
of hanging any faded red-silk stoles or copes, or 
whatever those ecclesiastical garments are, on my 
walls. I reserve the right to admire such a vest- 
ment when it is worn by the officiating cleric at 
church, but for the life of me and despite all that 
has repeatedly been said to me on the subject I fail 
to see where it belongs in a simple household as a 
part of the scheme of ornamentation. 

I do not think it proper to display a strange 
clergyman's cast-off costume in my little home any 
more than I would expect the canon of a cathedral 
to let me hang up a pair of my old overalls in his 
cathedral. Nor — if I must confess it — have I felt 
[190] 



AND SOLD TO 



w 



myself greatly drawn to the suggestion that we 
should have a lot of tall hand-painted candles sitting 
or standing round in odd spots, I mean those can- 
dlesticks which are painted in faded colors, with 
touches of dull gilt here and there on them and 
which are called after a lady named Polly Crome — 
their original inventor, I suppose she was, though 
her name does sound more as if Arnold Bennett 
had written her than as if she were a native Italian. 
I imagine she thought up this idea of a hand- 
painted candlestick nine feet tall and eighteen 
inches through at the base, and then in her honor the 
design was called after her, which in my humble opin- 
ion was compounding one mistake on top of another* 
Likewise I fear that I shall never become entirely 
reconciled to these old-model Italian chairs. My 
notion of a chair is something on which a body can 
sit for as long as half an hour without anesthetics. 
In most other details concerning antique furniture 
they have made a true believer out of me, but as 
regards chairs I am still some distance from being 
thoroughly converted. In chairs I favor a chair 
that is willing to meet you halfway, as it were, in 
an effort to be mutually comfortable. The other 
kind — the kind with a hard flat wooden seat and 

- [191] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

short legs and a stiff high back, a chair which looks 
as though originally it had been designed to be 
used by a clown dog in a trained animal act — may 
be artistic and beautiful in the chasteness of its 
lines and all this and that ; but as for me, I say give 
me the kind of chair that has fewer admirers and 
more friends in the fireside circle. I take it that the 
early Italians were not a sedentary race. They 
could not have figured on staying long in one place. 
I suppose the trouble with me is that I was born 
and brought up on the American plan and have 
never entirely got over it. In fact I was told as 
much, though not perhaps in exactly those words, 
when antiques first became a vital issue in our do- 
mestic life. In no uncertain terms I was informed 
that everybody who is anybody goes in for the Ital- 
ian these times. I believe the only conspicuous ex- 
ceptions to the rule are the Italians who have emi- 
grated to these shores. They, it would appear, are 
amply satisfied with American fixtures and fittings. 
I have a suspicion that possibly some of them in 
coming hither may have been actuated by a desire 
to get as far away as possible from those medieval 
effects in plumbing which seem to be inseparable 
from Old World architecture. 
[192] 



'AND SOLD TO 



My education progressed another step forward 
on the occasion of my first visit to an auction room 
where presumably desirable pieces of Italian work- 
manship were displayed as a preliminary to their 
being disposed of by public outcry. I was accom- 
panied by a friend — the wormholeist already men- 
tioned — and when he lapsed into rhapsodies over a 
pair of gilt mirrors, or rather mirrors which once 
upon a time, say about the time of the Fall of the 
Roman Empire, had been gilded, I was astonished. 

"Surely," I said, ''nobody would want those 
things. See where the glass is flawed — ^the quick- 
silver must be pretty nearly all gone from the backs 
of them. And the molding is falling off in chunks 
and what molding is left is so dingy and stained 
that it doesn't look like anything at all. If you're 
asking me, I'd call those mirrors a couple of total 
losses." 

''Exactly!" he said. "That is precisely what 
makes them so desirable. You can't counterfeit 
such age as these things show, my boy." 

"I shouldn't care to try," I said. "Where I came 
from, when a mirror got in such shape that you 
couldn't see yourself in it it was just the same to 
us as a chorus girl that had both legs cut off in a 

[193] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

railroad accident — it was regarded as having lost 
most of its practical use in life. Still, it is not for 
me, a raw green novice, a sub-novice as you might 
say, to set myself up against an expert like you. 
Anyhow, as the fellow said, live and learn. Let us 
move along to the next display of moldy remains." 

We did so. We came to a refectory table. Ordi- 
narily a refectory table mainly differs in outline 
from the ordinary dining table by being constructed 
on the model of a dachshund. But this table, I 
should guess offhand, had seen about four centuries 
of good hard steady refecting at the hands of suc- 
ceeding generations of careless but earnest feeders. 
Its top was chipped and marred by a million scars, 
more or less. Its legs were scored and worn down. 
Its seams gaped. From sheer weakness it canted 
far down to one side. The pressure of a hand upon 
it set the poor, slanted, crippled wreck to shaking 
as though along with all its other infirmities it had 
a touch of buck ague. 

*'What about this incurable invalid?" I asked. 
'^Unless the fellow who buys it sends it up in a 
padded ambulance it'll be hard to get it home all 
in one piece. I suppose that makes it all the more 
valuable, eh?" 
[194] 



<< 



AND SOLD TO 



"Absolutely!" he said. "It's a perfectly marvel- 
ous thing! I figure it should bring at least six hun- 
dred dollars." 

"And cheap enough," I said. "Why, it must 
have at least six hundred dollars' worth of things 
the matter with it. A good cabinet-maker could 
put in a nice busy month just patching " 

"You don't understand," he said. "You surely 
wouldn't touch it?" 

"I shouldn't dare to," I said. "I was speaking 
of a regular cabinet-maker. No green hand should 
touch it — he'd have it all in chunks in no time." 

"But the main value of it lies in leaving it in its 
present shape," he told me. "Don't you realize that 
this is a condition which could never be duplicated 
by a workman?" 

"Well, I've seen some house wreckers in my time 
who could produce a pretty fair imitation," I re- 
torted playfully. I continued in a musing vein, for 
the sight of that hopelessly damaged wreck all 
worn down and dented in and slivered off had sent 
my mind backward to a memory of early childhood. 
I said: 

"I can see now how my parents made a mistake 

[195] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

in stopping me from doing something I tackled 
when I was not more than six years old. I was an 
antiquer, but I didn't know it and they didn't know 
it. They thought that I was damaging the furni- 
ture, when as a matter of fact in my happy, inno- 
cent, childish way I was adding touches to it which 
would have been worth considerable money by 
now." 

What I was thinking of was this : On my sixth 
birthday, I think it was, an uncle of mine for whom 
I was named gave me a toy tool chest containing a 
complete outfit of tools. There was a miniature 
hammer and a plane and a set of wooden vises and 
a gimlet and the rest of the things which belong in 
a carpenter's kit, but the prize of the entire collec- 
tion to my way of thinking was a cross-cut saw 
measuring about eight inches from tip to tip. 

Armed with this saw, I went round sawing 
things, or rather trying to. I could not exactly 
saw with it, but I could haggle the edges and cor- 
ners of wood, producing a gnawed, frazzled effect. 
My quest for stuff suitable to exercise mj^ handi- 
craft on led me into the spare, or company room, 
where I found material to my liking. I was rak- 
ing away at the legs of a rosewood center table — 
[196] 



'AND SOLD TO 



had one leg pretty well damaged to my liking and 
was preparing to start on another — when some offi- 
cious grown person happened in on me and stopped 
me with violent words. If I had but been left un- 
disturbed for half an hour or so I doubtless would 
have achieved a result which now after a lapse of 
thirty-odd years would have thrilled a lover of an- 
tiques to the core of his being. But this was not 
to be. 

My present recollection of the incident is that I 
was chided in a painful physical way. The latter- 
day system of inculcating lessons in the mind of 
the child according to a printed form chart of sooth- 
ing words was not known in our community at that 
time. The old-fashioned method of using the back 
of a hairbrush and imparting the lesson at the other 
end of the child from where the mind is and letting 
it travel all the way through him was employed. 
I was then ordered to go outdoors where there 
would be fewer opportunities for engaging in what 
adults mistakenly called mischief. 

Regretting that the nurse that morning had seen 
fit to encase me in snug-fitting linen breeches in- 
stead of woolen ones, I wandered about carrying 
my saw in one hand and with the other hand from 

[197] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

time to time rubbing a certain well-defined area of 
my small person to allay the afterglow. In the 
barnyard I came upon an egg lying on the edge of 
a mud puddle under the protecting lee of the 
chicken-yard fence. I can shut my eyes and see 
that egg right now. It was rather an abandoned- 
looking egg, stained and blotched with brownish- 
yellow spots. It had the look about it of an egg 
with a past — a fallen egg, as you might say. 

Some impulse moved me to squat down and draw 
the toothed blade of my saw thwartwise across the 
bulge of that egg. For the first time in my little 
life I was about to have dealings with a genuine 
antique, but naturally at my age and with my lim- 
ited experience I did not realize that. Probably I 
was actuated only by a desire to find out whether 
I could saw right through the shell of an egg amid- 
ships. That phase of the proceedings is somewhat 
blurred in my mind, though the denouement re- 
mains a vivid memory spot to this very day. 

I imparted a brisk raking movement to the saw. 
It is my distinct recollection that a fairly loud ex- 
plosion immediately occurred. I was greatly 
shocked. One too young to know aught of the 
chemical effect on the reactions following the ad- 
[198] 



'AND SOLD TO 



mission of fresh air to gaseous matter, which has 
been forming to the fukninating point within a 
tightly sealed casing, would naturally be shocked 
to have an egg go off suddenly in that violent man- 
ner. Modern military science, I suppose, would 
classify it as having been a contact egg. 

Not only was I badly shocked, but also I had a 
profound conviction that in some way I had been 
taken advantage of — that my confidence had in 
some strange fashion been betrayed. I left my saw 
where I had dropped it. At the moment I felt that 
never again would I care to have anything to do 
with a tool so dangerous. I also left the imme- 
diate vicinity of where the accident had occurred 
and for some minutes wandered about in rather a 
distracted fashion. There did not seem to be any 
place in particular for me to go, and yet I could 
not bear to stay wherever I was. I wished, as it 
were, to get entirely away from myself — a morbid 
fancy perhaps for a mere six-year-old to be hav- 
ing, and yet, I think, a natural one under the cir- 
cumstances. 

I had a conviction that I would not be welcomed 
indoors and at the same time realized that even out 
in the great open where I could get air — and air 

[199] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

was what I especially craved — I was likely to be 
shunned by such persons as I might accidentally 
encounter. Indeed I rather shunned myself, if you 
get what I mean. I was filled with a general shun- 
ning sensation. I felt mortified, too. And this 
emotion, I found a few minutes later, was shared 
by the black cook, who, issuing from the kitchen 
door, happened upon me in the act of endeavoring 
to freshen up myself somewhat from a barrel of 
rain water which stood under the eaves. She evi- 
dently decided offhand that not only had mortifica- 
tion set in but that it had reached an advanced 
stage. Her language so indicated. 

And now, after more than three and a half 
decades, here on Fifth Avenue more than a thou- 
sand miles remote from those infantile scenes, I was 
gleaning another memorable lesson about antiques. 
I was learning that junk ceases to be junk if only 
it costs enough money, and thereafter becomes 
treasure. 

Having had this great principal fact firmly im- 
planted in my consciousness, I shortly thereafter 
embarked in congenial company upon the auction- 
room life upon which already I have touched. We 
went to sales when we had anything to buy and 
[200] 



AND SOLD TO 



99 



when we had nothing to buy — somehow we did not 
seem to be able to stay away. The joy of bidding a 
thing up and maybe of having it knocked down to 
us undermined our pooled will power ; it weakened 
our joint resistance. 

"And sold to '* became our slogan, our shib- 
boleth and our most familiar sentence. By day we 
heard it, by night it dinned in our ears as we slept, 
dreaming dreams of going bankrupt in this mad, 
delirious pursuit which had mastered us and spend- 
ing our last days in a poorhouse entirely furnished 
in Italian antiques. 

But taking everything into consideration, I must 
say the game was worth the candle. By degrees 
we acquired the furnishings for our two Italian 
rooms and our other rooms — which, thank heaven, 
are not Italian but what you might call fancy- 
mixed! And by degrees likewise I perfected my 
artistic education. Of course we made mistakes in 
selection, as who does not? We have a few auction- 
room skeletons tucked away in our closet, or to 
speak more exactly, in the attic of the new house. 
But in the main we are satisfied with what we have 
done and no doubt will continue to be until Italian- 
style furniture goes out and Aztec Indian or Peru- 

[201] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

vian Inca or Thibetan Grand Llama or some other 
style comes in. 

And when our friends drop in for an evening we 
talk decorations and furnishings — it is a subject 
which never wears out. Mostly the women callers 
favor discussions of tapestries and brocades with 
intervals spent in fits of mutual wonder over the 
terrible taste shown by some other woman — not 
present — in buying the stuff for her house ; and the 
men are likely to be interested in carvings or paint- 
ings; but my strong suit is wormholing in all its 
branches — that and patina. I am very strong on 
the latter subject, also. In fact among friends I 
am now getting to be known as the Patina Kid. 



[2021 



CHAPTER VIII: THE ADVENTURE OF LADY 
MAUDE 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

I HAVE dealt at length v^ith our adventures at 
Fifth Avenue auction houses v^hen we were amass- 
ing the furnishings for our Italian rooms and our 
Italian hallway. But I forgot to make mention of 
the many friends we encountered at the salesrooms 
— people who always before had seemed to us en- 
tirely normal, but now were plainly to be recog- 
nized for devotees of the same passion for bidding- 
in which had lain its insidious clutches upon us. I 
recall one victim in particular, a young woman 
whom I shall call Maude because that happens to 
be her name. 

Theretofore this Maude lady had impressed me 
as being one of the sanest, most competent females 
of my entire acquaintance — good-looking, witty and 
with a fine sense of proportion. Yet behold, here 
she was, balanced on the edge of a folding chair in 
an overheated, overcrowded room, her eyes feverish 
with a fanatical light, a printed catalogue clutched 

[205] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

in her left hand and her right ready to go up in 
signal to the hypnotic gentleman on the auctioneer's 
block. At a glance we knew the symptoms because 
in them we saw duplicated our own. We knew 
exactly what ailed her: She was bidding on vari- 
ous articles, not because she particularly wanted 
them, but because she feared unless she bought them 
some stranger might. 

After the sale had ended and her excitement — 
and ours — had abated we exchanged confidences 
touching on our besetting mania. 

*'Just coming and buying something that I wish 
afterward I hadn't bought isn't the worst of it," 
she owned. "That is destructive only to my spend- 
ing allowance. My chief trouble is that I've gotten 
so I can't bear to think of spending my afternoons 
anywhere except at this place or one of the places 
like it. And if there happen to be two sales going 
the same day at different shops I'm perfectly miser- 
able. All the time I'm sitting in one I'm distracted 
by the thought that possibly I'm missing some per- 
fectly wonderful bargain at the other. Sometimes 
I suspect that my intellect is beginning to give way 
under the strain, and then again I'm sure I'm on 
the verge of a nervous breakdown. My husband 
[206] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

has his own diagnosis. He says I'm just plain 
nutty, as he vulgarly expresses it. He has taken 
to calling me Nutchita, which he says is Spanish 
for a little nut. You know since Scott came back 
from South America he just adores to show off the 
Spanish he learned. He loves to tell how he went 
to a bull fight down there and saw the gallant man- 
datory stab the charging parabola to the heart with 
his shining bolero or whatever you call it. 

*'He says there is no hope of curing me and he 
appreciates the fact that teams of horses couldn't 
drag me away from these auction rooms, but he 
suggested that maybe we might be saved from 
spending our last days at the almshouse if before 
I started out on my mad career each afternoon I*d 
get somebody to muffle me and tie my arms fast so 
I couldn't bid on anji;hing. But even if I couldn't 
speak or gesticulate I could still nod, so I suppose 
that wouldn't help. Besides, as I said to him, I 
would probably attract a good deal of attention 
riding down Fifth Avenue with my hands tied be- 
hind my back and a gag in my mouth. But he says 
he'd much rather I were made conspicuous now 
than that I should be even more conspicuous later 
on at a feeble-minded institute ; he says they'd prob- 

[207] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

ably keep me in a strait- jacket anyhow after I 
reached the violent stage and that I might as well 
begin getting used to the feeling now. 

**A11 joking aside, though, I really did have a 
frightful experience last winter," she continued. 
"There was a sale of desirable household effects 
advertised to take place up at Blank's on West 
Forty-fifth Street and of course I went. IVe spent 
so much of my time at Blank's these last few 
months I suppose people are beginning to think 
I live there. Well, anyway, I was one of the first 
arrivals and just as I got settled the auctioneer put 
up a basket; a huge, flat, curious-looking, wicker- 
work affair, it was. You never in all your life saw 
such a basket! It was too big for a soiled-clothes 
hamper and besides wasn't the right shape. And 
it was too flat to store things in and it didn't have 
any top on it either. I suppose you would just call 
it a kind of a basket. 

"Well, the man put it up and asked for bids on 
it, but nobody bid; and then the auctioneer looked 
right at me in an appealing sort of way — I feel that 
everybody connected with the shop is an old friend 
of mine by now, and especially the auctioneer — so 
when he looked in my direction with that yearning 
[208] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

expression in his eye I bid a dollar just to start it 
off for him. And what do you think? Before you 
could say scat he'd knocked it down to me for a 
dollar. I just hate people who catch you up sud- 
denly that way! It discouraged me so that after 
that the sale was practically spoiled for me. I 
didn't have the courage to bid on another thing the 
whole afternoon. 

"When the sale was over I went back to the 
packing room to get a good look at what I'd 
bought. And, my dear, what do you suppose? I 
hadn't bought a single basket — ^that would have 
been bad enoTigh — but no, I'd bought a job lot, 
comprising the original basket and its twin sister 
that was exactly like it, only homelier if anything, 
and on top of that an enormous square wooden box 
painted a bright green with a great lock fastening 
the lid down. That wretch of an auctioneer had 
deliberately taken a shameful advantage of me. 
How was I to know I was bidding in a whole 
wagonload of trash? Obtaining money under false 
pretenses, that's what I call it. 

*'Well, I stood aghast — or perhaps I should say 
I leaned aghast, because the shock was so great I 
felt I had to prop myself up against something. 

[209] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

Why, the box alone must have weighed a hundred 
and fifty pounds. It didn't seem to be the sort of 
box you could put anything in either. It wouldn't 
do for a wood box or a coal box or a dog house or 
anj^thing. It was just as useless as the baskets 
were, and they were nothing more nor less than 
two orders of willow-ware on the half shell. Even 
if they had been of any earthly use, what could I 
do with them in the tiny three-room apartment that 
we were occupying last winter? Isn't it perfectly 
shameful the way these auction-room people im- 
pose on the public? They don't make any excep- 
tions either. Here was I, a regular customer, and 
just see what they had done to me, all because I'm 
go good-natured and sympathetic. I declare some- 
times I'm ready to take a solemn oath I'll never do 
another favor for anybody so long as I live. It's 
the selfish ones who get along in this world ! 

**Well, when I realized what a scandalous trick 
had been played on me I was seized with a wild 
desire to get away. I decided I would try to slip 
out. But the manager had his eye on me. You 
know the rule they have: 'Claim all purchases and 
arrange for their removal before leaving premises, 
otherwise goods will be stored at owner's risk and 
[210] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

cost.' And he called me back and told me my 
belongings were ready to be taken away and would 
I kindly get them out of the house at once because 
they took up so much room. Room? They took 
up all the room there was. You had to step into 
one of the baskets to get into the place and climb 
over the box to get out again. 

*'I asked him how I was going to get those things 
up to my address and he suggested a taxi. I told 
him I would just run out and find a taxi, meaning, 
of course, to forget to come back. But he told me 
not to bother because there was a taxi at the door 
that had been ordered to come for somebody else 
and then wasn't needed. And before I could think 
up any other excuse to escape he'd called the taxi 
driver in. And the taxi man took one look at my 
collection of junk and then he asked us if we 
thought he was driving a moving van or a Noah's 
ark and laughed in a low-bred way and went out. 

"At that I had a faint ray of hope that maybe 
after all I might be saved, because I had made up 
my mind to tell the manager I would just step out- 
side and arrange to hire a delivery wagon or some- 
thing, and that would give me a chance to escape; 
but I think he must have suspected something from 

[211] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

my manner because already he was calling in an- 
other taxi driver from off the street, and there I 
was, trapped. And the driver of the second taxi 
was more accommodating than the other one had 
been, though goodness knows his goodness of heart 
was no treat to me. I should have regarded it as a 
personal kindness on his part if he had behaved as 
the first driver had done. But no, nothing would 
do but that he must load that ghastly monstrosity 
of a box up alongside him on the rack where they 
carry trunks, and two of the packing-room men 
tied it on with ropes so it couldn't fall off and get 
lost. I suppose they thought by that they were 
doing me a favor ! And then I got in the cab feel- 
ing like Marie Antoinette on her way to be be- 
headed, and they piled those two baskets in on top 
of me and the end of one of them stuck out so far 
that they couldn't get the door shut but had to 
leave it open. And then we rode home, only I 
didn't feel like Marie Antoinette any more; I felt 
like something that was being delivered in a crate 
and had come partly undone on the way. 

"And when we got up to Eighty-ninth Street 
that bare-faced robber of a taxicab driver charged 
me two extra fares — just think of such things be- 
[212] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

ing permitted to go on in a city where the police 
are supposed to protect people! And then he un- 
loaded all that mess on the sidewalk in front of the 
apartment house and drove off and left me there 
standing guard over it — probably the forlornest, 
most helpless object in all New York at that mo- 
ment. 

"I got one of the hallboys to call the janitor up 
from the basement and I asked him if he would be 
good enough to store my box and my two baskets 
in the storeroom where the tenants keep their 
trunks. And he said not on my life he wouldn't, 
because there wasn't any room to spare in the trunk 
room and then he asked me what I was going to do 
with all that truck anyway, and though it was none 
of his business I thought it would be tactful to make 
a polite answer and I told him I hadn't exactly 
decided yet and that I certainly would appreciate 
his kindness if he could just tuck my things away 
in some odd corner somewhere until I had fully 
made up my mind. While I was saying that I was 
giving him one of my most winning smiles, though 
it hurt like the toothache to smile under the circum- 
stances and considering what I'd already been 
through. 

[213] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

"But all he said was : 'Huh, lady, you couldn't 
tuck them things away at Times Square and Forty- 
third Street and that's the biggest corner I knows 
of in this town.' 

*'The impudent scoundrel wouldn't relent a mite 
either, until I'd given him a dollar for a tip, and 
then he did agree to keep the baskets in the coal 
cellar for a couple of days but no longer. But he 
absolutely refused to take the box along too, so 
I had to have it sent upstairs to the apartment and 
put in the bedroom because it was too big to go in 
the hall. And when the men got it in the bedroom 
I could hardly get in myself to take off my hat. 
And after that I sat down and cried a little, because 
really I was frightfully upset, and moreover I had 
a feeling that when Scott came home he would be 
sure to try to be funny. You know how husbands 
are, being one yourself! 

"Sure enough, when he came in the first thing 
he saw was that box. He couldn't very well help 
seeing it because he practically fell over it as he 
stepped in the door. He said: 'What's this?' and 
I said: 'It's a box' — just like that. And he said: 
'What kind of a box?' And I didn't like his tone 
and I said : 'A green box. I should think anybody 
[214] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

would know that much.' And he said: *Ah, in- 
deed,' several times in a most aggravating way and 
walked round it. He couldn't walk all the way- 
round it on account of the wall being in the way; 
but as far round it as he could walk without bump- 
ing into the wall. And he looked at it and felt it 
with his hand and kicked it once or twice and then 
he sniffed and said: 'And what's it for?' And I 
said: 'To put things in.' And he said: 'For in- 
stance, what?' 

*'Now I despise for people to be so technical 
round me, and besides, of all the words in the Eng- 
lish language I most abhor those words 'for in- 
stance' ; but I kept my temper even if I was boiling 
inside and I said: 'It's to put things in that you 
haven't any other place to put them in.' Which 
was ungrammatical, I admit, but the best I could 
do under the prevalent conditions. And then he 
looked at me until I could have screamed, and he 
said: 'Maude, where did you get that damned 
thing?' And I said it wasn't a damned thing but a 
perfectly good box made out of wood and painted 
green and everything; and that I'd got it at an auc- 
tion sale for a dollar and that I considered it a real 
bargain. I didn't feel called on to tell him about 

[215] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

the two baskets down in the coal cellar just yet. 
So I didn't mention them; and anyhow, heaven 
knows I was sick and tired of the whole subject 
and ready to drop it, but he kept on looking at it 
and sniffing and asking questions. Some people 
have no idea how a great strong brute of a man 
can nag a weak defenseless woman to desperation 
when he deliberately sets out to do it. 

"Finally I said: 'Well, even if you don't hke 
the box I think it's a perfectly splendid box, and 
look what a good strong lock it has on it — surely 
that's worth something.' And he said: *Well, 
let's see about that — where's the key?' And, my 
dear, then it dawned on me that I didn't have any 
key I 

"Well, a person can stand just so much and no 
more. I'm a patient long-suffering woman and 
I've always been told that I* had a wonderful dis- 
position, but there are limits. And when he burst 
out laughing and wouldn't stop laughing but kept 
right on and laughed and laughed and leaned up 
against something and laughed some more until you 
could have heard him in the next block — why then, 
all of a sudden something seemed to give way in- 
side of me and I burst out crying — I couldn't hold 
[216] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

in another second — and I told him that I'd never 
speak to him again the longest day he lived and 
that he could go to Halifax or some other place 
beginning with the same initial and take the old 
box with him for all I cared; and just as I burst 
out of the room I heard him say: 'No, madam, 
when I married you I agreed to support you, but 
I didn't engage to take care of any air-tight, bur- 
glar-proof, pea-green box the size of a circus cage !* 
And I suppose he thought that was being funny, 
too. A perverted sense of humor is an awful cross 
to bear — in a husband! 

"So I went and lay down on the living-room 
couch with a raging, splitting, sick headache and 
I didn't care whether I lived or died, but on the 
whole rather preferred dying. After a little he 
came in, trying to hold his face straight, and begged 
my pardon. And I told him I would forgive him 
if he would do just two things. And he asked me 
what those two things were and I told him one was 
to quit snickering like an idiot every few moments 
and the other was never to mention boxes to me 
again as long as he lived. And he promised on his 
solemn word of honor he wouldn't, but he said I 
must bear with him if he smiled a little bit once in a 

[217] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

while as the evening wore on, because when he did 
that he would be thinking about something very 
funny that had happened at the office that day and 
not thinking about what I would probably think 
he was thinking about at all. And then he said 
how about running down to the Plaza for a nice 
little dinner and I said yes, and after dinner I felt 
braced up and strong enough to break the news 
to him about the two baskets. 

"And he didn't laugh; in justice to him I must 
say that much for him. He didn't laugh. Only he 
choked or something, and had a very severe cough- 
ing spell. And then we went home and while he 
was undressing he fell over the box and barked his 
shins on it, and though it must have been a strain 
on him he behaved like a gentleman and swore only 
a little. 

"But, my dear, the worst was yet to come ! The 
next day I had to arrange to send the whole lot to 
storage because we simply couldn't go on living 
with that box in the only bedroom we had ; and the 
bill for cartage came to two dollars and a quarter. 
After I had seen them off to the storage warehouse 
I tried to forget all about them. As a matter of 
fact they never crossed my mind again until we 
[218] 



THE ADVENTURE OF LADY MAUDE 

moved out to the country in April and then I sud- 
denly remembered about them — getting a bill for 
three months' storage at two dollars a month may 
have had something to do with bringing them forci- 
bly to my memory — and I telephoned in and asked 
the manager of the storage warehouse if he please 
wouldn't give them to somebody and he said he 
didn't know anybody who would have all that junk 
as a gift. So it seemed to me the best thing and 
the most economical thing to do would be to pay 
the bill to date and bring them on out to the place. 

"But, as it turned out, that was a financial mis- 
take, too. Because what with sending the truck all 
the way into town, thirty-eight miles and back 
again, and the wear and tear on the tires and the 
gasoline and the man's time who drove the truck 
and what Scott calls the overhead — ^though I don't 
see what he means by that because it is an open 
truck without any top to it at all — we figure, or 
rather Scott does, that the cost of getting them out 
to the country came to fourteen dollars. 

"And we still have them, and if you should hap- 
pen to know of anybody or should meet anybody 
who'd like to have two very large roomy wicker 
baskets and a very well-made wooden box painted 

[219] 



THE ABANDONED FAKMERS 

in all-over design in a very good shade of green 
and which may contain something valuable, be- 
cause I haven't been able to open it yet to find out 
what's inside, and with a lock that goes with it, 
I wish you'd tell them that they can send up to our 
place and get them any time that is convenient to 
them. Or if they don't live too far away I'd be 
very glad to send the things over to them. Only 
I'd like for them to decide as soon as possible be- 
cause the gardener, who is Swedish and awfully 
fussy, keeps coming in every few days and com- 
plaining about them and asking why I don't have 
them moved out of the greenhouse, which is where 
we are keeping them for the present, and put some 
other place where they won't be forever getting in 
his way. Only there doesn't seem to be any other 
suitable place to keep them in unless we build a 
shed especially for that purpose. Isn't it curious 
that sometimes on a hundred-acre farm there should 
be so little spare room? I should hate to go to the 
added expense of building that shed, and so, as I 
was saying just now, if you should happen upon 
any one who could use those baskets and that box 
please don't forget to tell them about my offer." 

[220] 



CHAPTER IX: US LANDED PROPRIETORS 



CHAPTER IX 

us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

To the best of my ability I have been quoting 
Lady Maude verbatim; but if unintentionally I 
have permitted any erroneous quotations to creep 
into her remarks they will be corrected before these 
lines reach the reader's eye, because the next time 
she and Scott come over — they are neighbors of 
ours out here in Westchester — I mean to ask her to 
read copy on this book. They drop in on us quite 
frequently and we talk furnishings, and Scott sits 
by and smokes and occasionally utters low mocking 
sounds under his breath, for as yet he has not been 
entirely won over to antiques. There are times 
when I fear that Scott, though a most worthy per- 
son in all other regards, is hopelessly provincial. 
Well, I was a trifle provincial myself before I took 
the cure. 

Perhaps I should say that sometimes we talk fur- 
nishings with Mistress Maude, but more often we 
talk farming problems, with particular reference to 

[223] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

our own successes and the failures of our friends in 
the same sphere of endeavor. Indeed, farming is 
the commonest topic of conversation in our vicinity. 
Because, like us, nearly all our friends in this part 
of the country were formerly flat dwellers and be- 
cause, like us, all of them have done a lot of experi- 
menting in the line of intensified, impractical agri- 
culture since they moved to the country. 

We seek to profit by one another's mistakes, and 
we do — ^that is, we profit by them to the extent of 
gloating over them. Then we go and make a few 
glaring mistakes on our own account, and when 
Jhe word of it spreads through the neighborhood, 
seemingly on the wings of the wind, it is their turn 
to gloat. We have a regular Gloat Club with an 
open membership and no dues. If an amateur 
tiller of the soil and his wife drop in on us on a fine 
spring evening to announce that yesterday they had 
their first mess of green peas, whereas our pea vines 
are still in the blossoming state ; or if in midsummer 
they come for the express purpose of informing us 
that they have been eating roasting ears for a week 
— ^they knowing full well that our early corn has 
suffered a backset — we compliment them with 
honeyed words, and outwardly our manner may 
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us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

bespeaK a spirit of friendly congratulation, but in 
our souls all is bitterness. 

After they have left one catches oneself saying 
to one's helpmeet: "Well, the Joneses are nice 
people in a good many respects. Jones would loan 
you the last cent he had on earth if you were in 
trouble and needed it, and in most regards Mrs. 
Jones is about as fine a little woman as you'd meet 
in a day's ride. But dog-gone it, I wish they didn't 
brag so much!" Then one of us opportunely re- 
calls that last year their potatoes developed a slow 
and mysterious wasting disease resembling malig- 
nant tetter, which carried off the entire crop in its 
infancy, whereas we harvested a cellarful of won- 
derful praties free from skin blemishes of whatever 
sort ; and warmed by that delectable recollection we 
cheer up a bit. And if our strawberries turn out 
well or our apple trees bear heavily or our cow has 
twin calves, both of the gentler sex, we lose no time 
in going about the countryside to spread the tid- 
ings, leaving in our wake saddened firesides and 
hearts all abrim with the concentrated essence of 
envy. 

Practically all our little group specialize. We 
go in for some line that is absolutely guaranteed to 

[225] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

be profitable until the expense becomes too great 
for a person of limited means any longer to bear up 
under. Then we drop that and specialize in an- 
other line, also recommended as being highly lucra- 
tive, for so long as we can afford it; and then we 
tackle something else again. It is a never-ending 
round of new experiences, because no matter how 
disastrously one's most recent experiment has 
turned out the agricultural weeklies are constantly 
holding forth the advantages of a field as yet new 
and untried and morally insured to be one that will 
yield large and nourishing dividends. It is my 
sober conviction that the most inspired fiction writ- 
ers in America — the men with the most buoyant 
imaginations — are the regular contributors to our 
standard agricultural journals. And next to them 
the most gifted romancers are the fellows who sell 
bulbs and seeds. They are not fabuHsts exactly, 
because fables have morals and frequently these 
persons have none, but they are inspired fancifiers, 
I'll tell the world. 

Each succeeding season finds each family among 
us embarking upon some new and fascinating ven- 
ture. For instance, I have one friend who this 
year went in for bees — Italian bees, I think he said 
[226] 



us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

they were, though why he should have been preju- 
diced against the native-born variety I cannot 
understand. He used to drop in at our place to 
borrow a little cooking soda — he was constantly 
running out of cooking soda at his house owing to 
using so much of it on his face and hands and his 
neck for poulticing purposes — and tell us what 
charming creatures bees were and how much honey 
he expected to lay by that fall. From what he said 
we gathered that the half had never been told by 
Maeterlinck about the engaging personal habits 
and captivating tribal customs of bees; bees, we 
gathered, were, as a race, perhaps a trifle quick- 
tempered and hot-headed, or if not exactly hot- 
headed at least hot elsewhere, but ever ready to 
forgive and forget and, once the heat of passion 
had passed, to let bygones be bygones. A bee, it 
seemed from his accounts, was one creature that 
always stood ready to meet you halfway. 

He finally gave up bee culture though, not be- 
cause his enthusiasm had waned, for it did not, but 
for professional reasons solely. He is a distin- 
guished actor and when he got the leading role in a 
new play it broke in on his study of the part to be 
dropping the manuscript every few minutes and 

[227] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

grabbing up a tin dish and running out in an en- 
deavor, by the power of music, to induce a flock of 
swarming bees to rehive themselves, or whatever it 
is bees are supposed to do when favored with a pie- 
pan solo. It seemed his bees had a perfect mania 
for swarming. The least little thing would set 
them off. There must have been too much artistic 
temperament about the premises for such emotional 
and flighty creatures as bees appear to be. 

Then there was another reason : After the play 
went on he found it interfered with his giving the 
best that was in him to his art if he had to go on for 
a performance all bumpy in spots; also he discov- 
ered that grease paint had the effect of irritating a 
sting rather than soothing it. The other afternoon 
he came over and off*ered to give me his last remain- 
ing hive of bees. Indeed, he almost pressed them 
on me. 

I declined though. I told him to unload his little 
playmates on some stranger; that I valued his 
friendship and hoped to keep it; the more espe- 
cially, as I now confessed to him, since I had lately 
thought that if literature ever petered out I might 
take up the drama as a congenial mode of liveli- 
hood, and in such case would naturally benefit 
[228] 



us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

through the good offices of a friend who was already 
in the business and doing well at it. Not, however, 
that I felt any doubt regarding my ultimate suc- 
cess. I do not mean by this that I have seriously 
considered playwriting as a regular profession. 
Once I did seriously consider it, but nobody else 
did, and especially the critics didn't. Remember- 
ing what happened to the only dramatic offering 
I ever wrote, I long ago made up my mind that if 
ever I wrote another play — which, please heaven, 
I shall not — I would call it Solomon Grundy, 
whether I had a character of that name in it or not. 
You may recall what happened to the original Sol- 
omon Grundy — how he was born on a Monday, 
began to fail on Thursday, passed away on Satur- 
day of the same week and was laid to eternal rest 
on Sunday. So even though I never do another 
play I have the name picked out and ready and 
waiting. 

No, my next venture into the realm of Thespis, 
should necessity direct my steps thither, would land 
me directly upon the histrionic boards. Ever since I 
began to fill out noticeably I have nourished this 
ambition secretly. As I look at it, a pleasing 
plumpness of outline should be no handicap but on 

[229] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

the contrary rather a help. My sex of course is 
against my undertaking to play The Two Orphans, 
otherwise I should feel no doubt of my ability to 
play both of them, and if they had a little sister I 
shouldn't be afraid to take her on, too. But I do 
rather fancy myself in the title roles of The Corsi- 
can Brothers. If I should show some enterprising 
manager how he might pay out one salary and save 
another, surely the idea would appeal to him; and 
some of these fine days I may give the idea a try. 
So having this contingency in mind I gently but 
firmty told my friend to take his bees elsewhere. 
I told him I had no intention of looking a gift 
bee in the mouth. 

We have another neighbor who has gone in rather 
extensively for blooded stock with the intention ul- 
timately of producing butter and milk for the city 
market. During practically all his active life he 
has been a successful theatrical manager, which nat- 
urally qualifies him for the cow business. He is do- 
ing very well at it too. So long as he continues to 
enjoy successful theatrical seasons he feels that he 
will be able to go on with cows. Being a shrewd 
and farseeing business man he has it all figured out 
that a minimum of three substantial enduring hits 
[2301 



us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

every autumn will justify him in maintaining his 
herd at its present proportions, whereas with four 
shows on Broadway all playing to capacity he 
might even increase it to the extent of investing in 
a few more head of registered thoroughbred stock. 
From him I have gleaned much regarding cows. 
Before, the life of a cow fancier had been to me as 
a closed book. Generally speaking, cows, so far 
as my personal knowledge went, were divided 
roughly into regular cows running true to sex, and 
the other kind of cows, which were invariably re- 
ferred to with a deep blush by old-fashioned maiden 
ladies. True enough, we owned cows during the 
earlier stages of our rural life; in fact, we own one 
now, a mild-eyed creature originally christened 
Buttercup but called by us Sahara because of her 
prevalent habits. But gentle bone-dry Sahara is 
just a plain ordinary cow of undistinguished ances- 
try. In the preceding generations of her line scan- 
dal after scandal must have occurred; were she a 
bagpipe solo instead of a cow scarcely could she 
have in her more mixed strains than she has. We 
acquired her at a bargain in an auction sale; she is 
a bargain to any one desiring a cow of settled and 
steady habits, regular at her meals, always with an 

[231] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

unfailing appetite and having a deep far-reaching 
voice. There is also an expectation that some fu- 
ture day we may also derive from her milk. How- 
ever, this contingency rests, as one might say, upon 
the laps of the gods. 

The point I am getting at though is that Sahara, 
whatever else of merit she may possess in the mat- 
ters of a kind disposition and a willingness to eat 
whatever is put before her, is after all but a mere 
common country-bred cow ; whereas the cows whose 
society my wealthy neighbor cultivates are the pedi- 
greed aristocrats of their breed, and for buying and 
selling purposes are valued accordingly. Why, 
from the way the proprietors of registered cows 
brag about their ancient lineage and their blue- 
blooded forbears you might think they were all 
from South Carolina or Massachusetts — ^the cows, 
I mean, not necessarily the proprietors. 

So it is with the man of whom I have been speak- 
ing. Having become a breeder of fancy stock he 
now appraises a cow not for what she can do on her 
own intrinsic merits but for the size of her family 
tree, provided she brings with her the documents 
to prove it. So far as cows are concerned he has 
become a confirmed ancestor worshiper. I am sure 
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us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

he would rather own a quarter interest in a col- 
lateral descendant of old Prince Bullcon the First 
of the royal family of the Island of Guernsey, even 
though the present bearer of the name were but an 
indifferent milker and of unsettled habits, than to 
be the sole possessor of some untitled but versatile 
cow giving malted milk and whipped cream. Such 
vagaries I cannot fathom. In a democratic coun- 
try like this, or at least in a country which used to 
be democratic, it seems to me we should value a 
cow not for what her grandparents may have been; 
not for the names emblazoned on her genealogical 
record, but for what she herself is. 

The other Sunday we drove over to his place os- 
tensibly to pay a neighborly call but really to plant 
distress in his fireside circle by incidentally men- 
tioning that our young grapevines were bearing 
magnificently. 

You see, a member of the Gloat Club is expected 
to work at his trade Sundays as well as weekdays; 
and besides we had heard that his arbors, with the 
coming of the autumn, had seemed a bit puny. So 
the opportunity was too good to be lost and we 
went over. 

After I had driven the harpoon into his soul and 

[233] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

watched it sink into him up to the barbs he took me 
out to see the latest improvements he had made 
in his cow barn and to call upon the newest addition 
to his herd. These times you can bed a hired hand 
down almost anywhere, but if you go in for blooded 
stock you must surround them with the luxuries to 
which they have been accustomed, else they are apt 
to go into a decline. He invited my inspection of 
the porcelain-walled stalls and the patent feeding 
devices and the sanitary fixtures which abounded on 
every hand, and to his recently installed cream sep- 
arator. In my youth the only cream separator com- 
monly in vogue was the type of drooping mustache 
worn by the average deputy sheriff, and anyhow, 
with it, cream separating was merely incidental, 
the real purposes of the mustache being to be orna- 
mental and impressive and subtly to convey a 
proper respect for the majesty of the law. Often 
a town marshal wore one too. But the modern 
separator is a product of science and not a gift of 
Nature skillfully elaborated by the art of the bar- 
ber. It costs a heap of money and it operates by 
machinery and no really stylish dairy farm is com- 
plete without it. 

When I had viewed these wonders he led me to 
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us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

a glorified pasture lot and presented me to the oc- 
cupant — a smallish cow of a prevalent henna tone. 
Except that she had rather slender legs and a 
permanent wave between the horns she seemed to 
my uninitiated eyes much the same as any other 
cow of the Jersey persuasion. I realized, however, 
that she must be very high-church. My friend, I 
knew, would harbor no nonconformist cows in his 
place, and besides, she distinctly had the high- 
church manner, a thing which is indefinable in terms 
of speech but unmistakably to be recognized wher- 
ever found. Otherwise, though, I could observe 
nothing about her calculated to excite the casual 
passer-by. But my friend was all enthusiasm. 

"Now," he said proudly, "what do you think of 
that for a perfect specimen?" 

"Well," I said, "anybody could tell that she's 
had a lot of refining influences coming into her life. 
She's no doubt cultured and ladylike to a degree; 
and she has the fashionable complexion of the hour 
and she's all marcelled up and everything, but ex- 
cepting for these adornments has she any special 
accomplishments that are calculated to give her 
class?" 

"Class 1" he repeated. "Class, did you say? Say, 

[235] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

listen! That cow has all the class there is. She's 
less than two years old and she cost me a cool fif- 
teen hundred cash — and cheap at the figure, at 
that." 

"Fifteen hundred," I murmured dazedly. "What 
does she give?" 

"Why, she gives milk, of course," he explained. 
"What else would she be giving?" 

"Well," I said, "I should think that at that price 
she should at least give music lessons. Perhaps she 
does plain sewing?" 

"Say," he demanded, "what do you expect for 
fifteen hundred dollars ? Fifteen hundred is a per- 
fectly ridiculous price to pay for a cow with a 
pedigree such as this cow has. She's registered back 
I don't know how far. It's the regal breeding you 
pay for when you get an animal like this — not the 
animal herself." 

But I refused to be swept off my feet. Before 
this I had associated with royalty. I once met a 
lineal descendant of William the Conqueror; he 
told me so himself. Being a descendant was ap- 
parently the only profession he had, and I judged 
this cow was in much the same line of business. 

"Well," I replied, "all I can say is that I 
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us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

wouldn't care if her ancestors came over on the 
Mayflower — if she belonged to me she'd have to 
show me something in the line of special endeavor. 
She'd have to have talents or we'd part company 
pretty pronto, I'm telling you." 

"It is evident you do not understand anything 
about blooded stock," he said. "The grandmother 
of this cow was insured for fifteen thousand dollars, 
and her great-grandfather, King Bulbul, was worth 
a fortune. The owner was offered fifty thousand 
for him — and refused it." 

In my surprise I could only mutter over and over 
again the name of William Tell's brother. A great 
many people do not know that William Tell ever 
had a brother. His first name was Wat. 

After that my friend gave me up as one hope- 
lessly sunken in ignorance, and by a mutual yet 
unspoken consent we turned the subject to the ac- 
tors' strike, which was then in full blast. But at 
intervals ever since I have been thinking of what he 
told me. To my way of thinking there is something 
wrong with the economic system of a country which 
saddles an income tax on an unmarried man with an 
income of more than two thousand dollars a year 
and if he be married sinks the ax into all he makes 

[237] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

above three thousand, leaving him the interest de- 
duction on the extra one thousand, amounting, I 
believe, to about twelve dollars and a half, for the 
support of his wife, on the theory that under the 
present scale of living any reasonably prudent man 
can suitably maintain a wife on twelve-fifty a year 
— I repeat, there is something radically wrong with 
a government which does this to the wage-earner 
and yet passes right on by a cow that carries fifteen 
thousand in life insurance and a bull worth fifty 
thousand in his own right. It amounts to class 
privilege, I maintain. It's almost enough to make 
a man vote the Republican ticket, and I may yet 
do it, too, sometime when there aren't any Demo- 
crats running, just to show how I feel about it. 

Yet others of our acquaintances in the amateur- 
farming group have taken up fruit growing or 
pigeons or even Belgian hares. Belgian hares have 
been highly recommended to us as being very pro- 
lific. You start in with one pair of domestic-minded 
Belgian hares and presently countless thousands of 
little Belgian heirs and heiresses are gladdening the 
landscape. From what I can hear the average Bel- 
gian hare has almost as many aunts and uncles and 
cousins as a microbe has. They pay well, too. You 
[238] 



us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

can sell a Belgian hare to almost anybody who has 
never tried to eat one. But as we have only about 
sixty acres and part of that in woodland, we have 
felt that there was scarcely room enough for us to 
go in for Belgian hares without sacrificing space 
which we may require for ourselves. 

Mainly our experiments have been confined to 
hogs and poultry. I will not claim that we have 
been entirely successful in these directions. The 
trouble seems to be that our pigs are so tremen- 
dously opposed to race suicide and that our hens are 
so firmly committed to it. Now offhand you might 
think an adult animal of the swine family that com- 
pletely gave herself over to the idea of multiplying 
and replenishing the earth with her species would 
be an asset to any farm, but in my own experience 
I have found that such is not always the case. Into 
the world a brood of little pinky-white squealers are 
ushered. They grow apace, devouring with avidity 
the most expensive brands of pig food that the 
grocer has in stock; and then, just when your mind 
is filled with delectable visions of hams in the 
smokehouse and flitches of bacon in the cellar and 
tierces of lard in the cold-storage room and spare- 
ribs and crackling and home-made country sausage 

[239] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

and pork tenderloins on the table — why, your 
prospects deliberately go and catch the hog cholera 
and are shortly no more. They have a perfect 
mania for it. They'll travel miles out of their way 
to catch it ; they'll sit up until all hours of the night 
in the hope of catching it. Hogs will swim the 
Mississippi River — and it full of ice — to get where 
hog cholera is. Our hogs have been observed in the 
act of standing in the pen with their snouts in the 
air, sniffing in unison until they attracted the germs 
of it right out of the air. It is very disheartening 
to be counting on bacon worth eighty cents a pound 
only to find that all you have on your hands is a 
series of hurried interments. 

In their own sphere of life turkeys are as suicid- 
ally minded as hogs are. I speak with authority 
here because we tried raising turkeys, too. For 
a young turkey to get its feet good and wet spells 
doom for the turkey, and accordingly it practically 
devotes its life to getting its feet wet. If it cannot 
escape from the pen into the damp grass immedi- 
ately following a rain it will in its desperation take 
other measures with a view to catching its death of 
cold. One of the most distressing spectacles to be 
witnessed in all Nature is a half-grown feeble- 
[240] 



us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

minded turkey obsessed with the maniacal idea that 
it was born a puddle duck, running round and 
round a coop trying to find a damp spot to stand 
on; it is a pitiful sight and yet exasperating. In 
order to get its feet wet an infant turkey has been 
known to jump down an artesian well two hun- 
dred feet deep. This is not mere idle rumor; it 
is a scientific fact well authenticated. If somebody 
would only invent a style of overshoe that might 
be worn in comfort by an adolescent turkey with- 
out making the turkey feel distraught or self-con- 
scious, that person would confer a boon upon the 
entire turkey race and at the same time be in a 
fair way to reap a fortune for himself. I know 
that a few months back if such an article had been 
in the market I would gladly have taken fifty 
pairs, assorted misses' and children's sizes. 

As for hens, I confess that at times I have felt 
like altogether abandoning my belief in the good 
faith and honest intentions of hens. Naturally one 
thinks of hens in connection with fresh-laid eggs, 
but my experience has been that the hen does not 
follow this line of reasoning. She prefers to go oif 
on a different bent. She figures she was created to 
adorn society, not to gladden the breakfast platter 

[241] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

of man. Or at any rate I would state that this has 
been the obsession customarily harbored by the 
hens which we have owned and which we persis- 
tently continue, in the face of disappointment com- 
pounded, to go on owning. 

We started out by buying, at a perfectly scanda- 
lous outlay, a collection of blooded hens of the 
white Plymouth Rock variety. We had been told 
that the sun never set on a setting white Plymouth 
Rock hen; that a white Plymouth Rock hen which 
had had the right sort of influences in her life and 
the right sort of hereditary instincts to guide her in 
her maturer career would inevitably dedicate her 
entire being to producing eggs. And we believed 
it until the hens we had purchased themselves of- 
fered proof to the absolute contrary. 

It was enough almost to break one's heart to see 
a great broad-beamed, full-busted husky hen prom- 
enading round the chicken run, eating her head 
off, gadding with her sister idlers, wasting the pre- 
cious golden hours of daylight in idle social pursuits 
and at intervals saying to herself: "Lay an egg'^. 
Well, I guess not! Why should I entail a strain 
on my nervous system and deny myself the pleas- 
ures of the gay life for the sake of these people? 
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us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

If they were able to pay four dollars for me, sight 
unseen, they are sufficiently affluent to buy their 
own eggs. Am I right? I'll say I am!" 

You could look at her expression and tell what 
she was thinking. And then when you went and 
made the rounds of the empty and untenanted nests 
you knew that you had correctly fathomed the 
workings of her mind. 

We tried every known argument on those hens 
in an effort to make them see the error of their ways 
and the advantages of eggs. We administered to 
them meat scraps and fresh carrots and rutabagas 
and sifted gravel and ground-up oyster shells; the 
only result was to make them finicky and particu- 
lar regarding their diet. No longer were they satis- 
fied with the things we ate ourselves ; no, they must 
have special dishes; they wished to be pampered 
like invalids. We bought for them large quanti- 
ties of costly chick feed — compounds guaranteed to 
start the most confirmed spinster hen to laying her 
head off. 

So far as I might observe, this, too, was of no 
avail. The more confirmed imbibers of the special 
dishes merely developed lumpy dropsical figures 
and sat about in shady spots and brooded in a 

[243] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

morbid way as though they had heavy loads on their 
minds. We killed one of them as a sacrifice to 
scientific investigation and cut her open, and lo, she 
was burdened inside with half-developed yolks — - 
a case, one might say, of mislaid eggs. 

In desperation I even thought of invoking the 
power of mental suggestion on them. Possibly it 
might help to hang up a picture of a lady sturgeon 
in the henhouse? Or would it avail to shoo them 
into a group and read aloud to them the begat 
chapter in the Old Testament? 

While I was considering these expedients some 
one suggested that probably the trouble lay in the 
fact that our fowls either were too highly bred or 
were too closely related and perhaps an infusion 
of new blood was what was needed. So now we 
went to the other extreme and added to our flock a 
collection of ordinary scrub hens, mixed as to breed 
and homely as to their outward appearance, but de- 
clared — by their former owner — to be passionately 
addicted to the pursuit of laying eggs. Conceding 
that this was true, the fact remained that immedi- 
ately they passed into our possession they became 
slackers and nonproducers. I imagine the mistake 
we made was in permitting them to associate with 
[244] 



us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

the frivolous white debutantes we already owned; 
undoubtedly those confirmed bachelor maids put 
queer ideas into their heads, causing them to believe 
there was no nourishment in achieving eggs to be 
served up with a comparative stranger's fried ham. 
On the theory that they might require exercise 
to stimulate their creative faculties we let them 
range through the meadows. Some among them 
promptly deserted the grassy leas to ravage our 
garden; others made hidden nests in the edges of 
the thickets, where the hawks and the weasels and 
the skunks and the crows might fatten on the fruits 
of their misdirected industry. So we cooped them 
up again in their run, whereupon they developed 
rheumatism and sore eyes and a perverted craving 
for eating one another's tail feathers. At present 
our chicken yard is nothing more nor less than a 
hen sanitarium. But we do not despair of ultimate 
success with our hens. We may have to cross them 
with the Potomac shad, but we mean to persevere 
until victory has perched upon our roosts. As Ru- 
pert Hughes remarked when, after writing a long 
list of plays which died a-borning, he eventually 
produced a riotous hit of hits: "Well, I'm only 
human — I couldn't fail every time." 

[245] 



THE ABANDONED FARMERS 

I should have said that there is one fad to which 
all our Westchester County colony of amateur 
farmers are addicted. Some may pursue one agri- 
cultural hobby and some another, but almost with- 
out exception the members of our little community 
are confirmed hired-help fanciers. You meet a 
neighbor and he tells you that after a disastrous 
experience with Polled Polaks he is now about to 
try the White Face Cockneys; they have been 
highly recommended to him. And next month 
when you encounter him again he is experimenting 
with Italian road builders or Scotch gardeners or 
Swedish stable hands or Afro- American tree trim- 
mers or what not. 

One member of our group after a prolonged sea- 
son of alternating hopes and disappointments dur- 
ing which he first hired and then for good and suffi- 
cient reasons fired representatives of nearly all the 
commoner varieties — plain and colored, domestic 
and imported, strays, culls and mavericks — decided 
to try his luck in the city at one of the employment 
agencies specializing in domestic servitors for coun- 
try places. He procured the address of such an 
establishment and repaired thither — simply attired 
in his everyday clothes. As soon as he en- 
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us LANDED PROPRIETORS 

tered the place he realized that he was in the 
wrong pew; here, plainly, was a shop to which re- 
paired the proprietors of ostentatious estates rather 
than the modest owners of farms, among whom he 
numbered himself. He tried to back out, making 
himself as inconspicuous as possible in so doing, but 
at that before he succeeded in escaping he had two 
good jobs offered to him — one as assistant groom 
in a racing stable over on Long Island and one as 
general handyman at a yacht club up in Connecti- 
cut. He is convinced now that the rich are so hard 
pressed for serv^ants that they'll hire ahnost any- 
body without requiring references. 

None of us will ever be rich ; we're all convinced 
of that, the cost of impractical farming being what 
it is, but by the same token none of us would give 
up the pleasures of a landed proprietor's lot — the 
word landed being here used to imply one baited, 
hooked and caught; i.e., a landed sucker — for the 
life of a flat dweller again. It's a great life if a 
fellow doesn't weaken — and we'll never weaken. 

THE END 



[2471 



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